This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either

the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Neuromancer

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

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ISBN: 1-101-14646-X

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Ace Books first published by The Ace Publishing Group, a member of

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ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Electronic edition: August, 2003

William Gibson lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and

their two children. His first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the

Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. Gibson is

credited with having coined the term “cyberspace,” and having envisioned

both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. In addition to

Neuromancer, he is the author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive,

Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties.

TO DEB

WHO MADE IT POSSIBLE

WITH LOVE

Contents
PART 1 CHIBA CITY BLUES
ONE
TWO
PART 2 THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
PART 3 MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
PART 4 THE STRAYLIGHT RUN
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
CODA DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL

TWENTY-FOUR

MY THANKS

SOME DARK HOLLER JACK WOMACK

PART 1

CHIBA CITY BLUES

ONE

THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

“It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his

way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s

developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a

Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you

could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.

Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he

filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a

webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the

bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp

naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise

rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in here early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said,

shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business

with you, Case?”

Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.

The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In

an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of

it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian

military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in

grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz

grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of

white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly

funny deal.”

“Sure,” Case said, and sipped his beer. “Somebody’s gotta be funny

around here. Sure the fuck isn’t you.”

The whore’s giggle went up an octave.

“Isn’t you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he’s a close

personal friend of mine.”

She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting

sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.

“Jesus,” Case said, “what kinda creepjoint you running here? Man

can’t have a drink.”

“Ha,” Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag. “Zone shows a

percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.”

As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of

silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had

simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out,

tinged with a certain hysteria.

Ratz grunted. “An angel passed.”

“The Chinese,” bellowed a drunken Australian, “Chinese bloody

invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix

you right, mate. . . .”

“Now that,” Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in

him like bile, “that is so much bullshit.”

THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese

had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole

bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the

damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.

All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in

Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic

unfolding across that colorless void. . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way

home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace

cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams

came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry

in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin

hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his

fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.

“I SAW YOUR girl last night,” Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.

“I don’t have one,” he said, and drank.

“Miss Linda Lee.”

Case shook his head.

“No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?”

The bartender’s small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. “I

think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you

get maybe too artistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Ratz.” He finished his beer, paid and left,

high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained khaki nylon of his

windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell

his own stale sweat.

CASE WAS TWENTY-FOUR. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one

of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley

and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost

permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked

into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied

consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief,

he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the

exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems,

opening windows into rich fields of data.

He’d made the classic mistake, the one he’d sworn he’d never make.

He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to

move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn’t sure how he’d been

discovered, not that it mattered now. He’d expected to die, then, but they

only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the

money. And he was going to need it. Because—still smiling—they were

going to make sure he never worked again.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.

Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by

micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.

For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was

the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance

involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case

fell into the prison of his own flesh.

HIS TOTAL ASSETS were quickly converted to new Yen, a fat sheaf of the old

paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the

world’s black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was

difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it

was already illegal.

In Japan, he’d known with a clenched and absolute certainty, he’d find

his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the shadowland of

black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and

microbionics, Chiba was a magnet for the Sprawl’s techno-criminal

subcultures.

In Chiba, he’d watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of

examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope,

had admired the expertise with which he’d been maimed, and then slowly

shaken their heads.

Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath

the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where

you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not

even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo

Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of

white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by

the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a

narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night

City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and

featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned

silver sky.

TWO BLOCKS WEST of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de Thé, Case

washed down the night’s first pill with a double espresso. It was a flat pink

octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of Zone’s

girls.

The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon.

At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less

hope of finding a cure, he’d gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling

fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone

else. In the first month, he’d killed two men and a woman over sums that a

year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the

street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some

secret poison he hadn’t known he carried.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism,

fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a

little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black

market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague

memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys

might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic

tanks.

Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted

punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the

demands of an intricate protocol.

Alone at a table in the Jarre de Thé, with the octagon coming on,

pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling

hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he’d started to

play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final

solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic

precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a

reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew

that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers,

who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge

that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its

expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee.

He’d found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.

Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke,

holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline. . . .

And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser

light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s

Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank

War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the

wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of

Wage’s ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his

pocket. He’d come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei

pavement and somehow she’d been singled out for him, one face out of the

dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The

expression on her face, then, had been the one he’d seen, hours later, on her

sleeping face in a portside coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to

represent a bird in flight.

Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he’d made, he

saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes

of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets at the

hoverport and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept up, falling along

Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the children of Tokyo trooping past

the famous boutiques in white loafers and clingwrap capes, until she’d

stood with him in the midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his

hand like a child.

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through

to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d

watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting

away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction.

He’d watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him

of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant

carp and crickets caged in bamboo.

He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It was

vibrating with the speed he’d taken. The brown laminate of the tabletop was

dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through his

spine he saw the countless random impacts required to create a surface like

that. The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous

century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics,

but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a

million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy

plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be

wiped away.

“Hey. Case, good buddy. . . .”

He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She was wearing

faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.

“I been lookin’ for you, man.” She took a seat opposite him, her

elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zipsuit had been ripped out at

the shoulders; he automatically checked her arms for signs of derms or the

needle. “Want a cigarette?”

She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket and

offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a red plastic tube. “You

sleepin’ okay, Case? You look tired.” Her accent put her south along the

Sprawl, toward Atlanta. The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-

looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines

of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her

mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The

pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map.

“Not if I remember to take my pills,” he said, as a tangible wave of

longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of

amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated

darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his

back.

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

“Wage,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “He wants to see you with a

hole in your face.” She lit her own cigarette.

“Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?”

“No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage’s boys.”

“I don’t owe him enough. He does me, he’s out the money anyway.”

He shrugged.

“Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the

example. You seriously better watch it.”

“Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?”

“Sleep.” She shook her head. “Sure, Case.” She shivered, hunched

forward over the table. Her face was filmed with sweat.

“Here,” he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker, coming up

with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded

it in quarters, and passed it to her.

“You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage.” There was

something in the gray eyes now that he couldn’t read, something he’d never

seen there before.

“I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more coming,” he lied,

as he watched his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket.

“You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.”

“I’ll see you, Linda,” he said, getting up.

“Sure.” A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils.

Sanpaku. “You watch your back, man.”

He nodded, anxious to be gone.

He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him, saw her

eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

FRIDAY NIGHT ON Ninsei.

He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee

shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped

out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-

Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man’s right hand.

Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble. If it

wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were

implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in

the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled

straight into a black clinic.

The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin

crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting

pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and

implants, and a dozen distinct species of hustler, all swarming the street in

an intricate dance of desire and commerce.

There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the

Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be

preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble

origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning

technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its

inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology

itself.

Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage

have him killed to make an example? It didn’t make much sense, but then

Wage dealt primarily in proscribed biologicals, and they said you had to be

crazy to do that.

But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case’s primary insight into the

dynamics of street dealing was that neither the buyer nor the seller really

needed him. A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.

The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of

Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with

betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble, he felt the

edge of a strange euphoria.

The week before, he’d delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular

extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He knew Wage hadn’t

liked that. Wage was his primary supplier, nine years in Chiba and one of

the few gaijin dealers who’d managed to forge links with the rigidly

stratified criminal establishment beyond Night City’s borders. Genetic

materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of

fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace something back,

once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a dozen cities.

Case found himself staring through a shop window. The place sold

small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket

VTRs, simstim decks, weighted manriki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken

had always fascinated him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were

chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on

water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against

scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fishline, their centers

stamped with dragons or yinyang symbols. They caught the street’s neon

and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he

voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

“Julie,” he said to his stars. “Time to see old Julie. He’ll know.”

JULIUS DEANE WAS one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism

assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His

primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where

genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in

Chiba. Then he’d fly to Hongkong and order the year’s suits and shirts.

Sexless and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his

devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never seen him wear

the same suit twice, although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of

meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century. He affected

prescription lenses, framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink

synthetic quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian dollhouse.

His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part of which

seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before, with a random

collection of European furniture, as though Deane had once intended to use

the place as his home. Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall

of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table

lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-

lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its

distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms

that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it

never told the correct time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass

shipping modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.

“You seem to be clean, old son,” said Deane’s disembodied voice. “Do

come in.”

Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive imitation-

rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT

EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in peeling self-adhesive capitals. If

the furniture scattered in Deane’s makeshift foyer suggested the end of the

past century, the office itself seemed to belong to its start.

Deane’s seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of light cast by

an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of dark green glass. The

importer was securely fenced behind a vast desk of painted steel, flanked on

either side by tall, drawered cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The

sort of thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written

records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes, scrolls of

yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter, a

machine Deane never seemed to get around to reassembling.

“What brings you around, boyo?” Deane asked, offering Case a narrow

bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked paper. “Try one. Ting Ting

Djahe, the very best.” Case refused the ginger, took a seat in a yawing

wooden swivel chair, and ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black

jeans-leg. “Julie, I hear Wage wants to kill me.”

“Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?”

“People.”

“People,” Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. “What sort of people?

Friends?”

Case nodded.

“Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”

“I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to you?”

“Haven’t been in touch, of late.” Then he sighed. “If I did know, of

course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they are,

you understand.”

“Things?”

“He’s an important connection, Case.”

“Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?”

“Not that I know of.” Deane shrugged. They might have been

discussing the price of ginger. “If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old

son, you come back in a week or so and I’ll let you in on a little something

out of Singapore.”

“Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?”

“Loose lips, old son!” Deane grinned. The steel desk was jammed with

a fortune in debugging gear.

“Be seeing you, Julie. I’ll say hello to Wage.”

Deane’s fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his pale silk tie.

HE WAS LESS than a block from Deane’s office when it hit, the sudden

cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close.

The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took

for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could

be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge

and composed his narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending

to let the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display window,

he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical boutique, closed for

renovations. With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through

the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of

imitation jade. The color of its skin reminded him of Zone’s whores; it was

tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip. Why

bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking, while sweat coursed

down his ribs, when you could just carry the thing around in your pocket?

Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied the reflection

of the passing crowd.

There.

Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored glasses, dark

clothing, slender . . .

And gone.

Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.

“RENT ME A gun, Shin?”

The boy smiled. “Two hour.” They stood together in the smell of fresh

raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall. “You come back, two hour.”

“I need one now, man. Got anything right now?”

Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once been filled

with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender package wrapped in

gray plastic. “Taser. One hour, twenty New Yen. Thirty deposit.”

“Shit. I don’t need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna shoot

somebody, understand?”

The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horseradish cans.

“Two hour.”

HE WENT INTO the shop without bothering to glance at the display of

shuriken. He’d never thrown one in his life.

He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank chip that

gave his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman Starr, the best he’d

been able to do for a passport.

The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she had a few

years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit of science. He took his

slender roll of New Yen out of his pocket and showed it to her. “I want to

buy a weapon.”

She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.

“No,” he said, “I don’t like knives.”

She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The lid was

yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a

swollen hood. Inside were eight identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He

watched while mottled brown fingers stripped the paper from one. She held

the thing up for him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one

end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the tube with one

hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and forefinger, and pulled.

Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coilspring slid out and

locked. “Cobra,” she said.

BEYOND THE NEON shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray.

The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have teeth tonight, and half the

crowd wore filtration masks. Case had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying

to discover a convenient way to conceal his cobra; finally he’d settled for

tucking the handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting

across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between his ribcage and

the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt like it might clatter to the

pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better.

The Chat wasn’t really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it attracted a

related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were different. The regulars were

still there, most of them, but they faded behind an influx of sailors and the

specialists who preyed on them. As Case pushed through the doors, he

looked for Ratz, but the bartender wasn’t in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar’s

resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as one of his girls

went to work on a young sailor. Zone was addicted to a brand of hypnotic

the Japanese called Cloud Dancers. Catching the pimp’s eye, Case

beckoned him to the bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow

motion, his long face slack and placid.

“You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?”

Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.

“You sure, man?”

“Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago.”

“Got some joeboys with him? One of ’em thin, dark hair, maybe a

black jacket?”

“No,” Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to indicate the

effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. “Big boys. Graftees.”

Zone’s eyes showed very little white and less iris; under the drooping lids,

his pupils were dilated and enormous. He stared into Case’s face for a long

time, then lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. “Cobra,”

he said, and raised an eyebrow. “You wanna fuck somebody up?”

“See you, Lonny.” Case left the bar.

HIS TAIL WAS back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation, the octagons

and adrenaline mingling with something else. You’re enjoying this, he

thought; you’re crazy.

Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in

the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but

strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a

field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking

to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a

highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all

around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the

mazes of the black market. . . .

Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck ’em in. Last thing they’ll expect. He

was half a block from the games arcade where he’d first met Linda Lee.

He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors. One of

them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was through the entrance, the

sound crashing over him like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his

stomach. Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a

simulated airburst drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram

fireball mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight of

unpainted chipboard stairs. He’d come here once with Wage, to discuss a

deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man called Matsuga. He

remembered the hallway, its stained matting, the row of identical doors

leading to tiny office cubicles. One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a

sleeveless black t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a

travel poster of Greece, Aegean blue splashed with streamlined ideograms.

“Get your security up here,” Case told her.

Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The last two

doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun and slammed the sole

of his nylon running shoe into the blue-lacquered composition door at the

far end. It popped, cheap hardware falling from the splintered frame.

Darkness there, the white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the

door to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob, leaning in

with everything he had. Something snapped, and he was inside. This was

where he and Wage had met with Matsuga, but whatever front company

Matsuga had operated was long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the

alley behind the arcade, filtering in through sootblown plastic. He made out

a snakelike loop of fiberoptics protruding from a wall socket, a pile of

discarded food containers, and the bladeless nacelle of an electric fan.

The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged out of his

jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched. It split, requiring two

more blows to free it from the frame. Over the muted chaos of the games,

an alarm began to cycle, triggered either by the broken window or by the

girl at the head of the corridor.

Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to full

extension.

With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume he’d gone

through the one he’d kicked half off its hinges. The cobra’s bronze pyramid

began to bob gently, the spring-steel shaft amplifying his pulse.

Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm, the

crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was

like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-

paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived for so long on a constant edge

of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was.

This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die

here. They might have guns. . . .

A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man’s voice, shouting

something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another crash.

And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.

Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of

his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting.

The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the

cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window, blind with fear, his

nerves screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was conscious

of what he’d done. The impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain

through his shins.

A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap

of discarded fiberoptics and the chassis of a junked console. He’d fallen

face forward on a slab of soggy chipboard; he rolled over, into the shadow

of the console. The cubicle’s window was a square of faint light. The alarm

still oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the games.

A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the fluorescents in

the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he still couldn’t read the

features. Glint of silver across the eyes. “Shit,” someone said, a woman, in

the accent of the northern Sprawl.

The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long count of

twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his hand, and it took him

a few seconds to remember what it was. He limped away down the alley,

nursing his left ankle.

SHIN’S PISTOL WAS a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a South

American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the first shot, with a

very rough pull. It was chambered for .22 long rifle, and Case would’ve

preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollowpoints Shin

had sold him. Still, it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as

he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in his jacket

pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in a raised dragon motif,

something to run your thumb across in the dark. He’d consigned the cobra

to a dump canister on Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.

The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei, then

over to Baiitsu. His tail, he’d decided, was gone, and that was fine. He had

calls to make, biz to transact, and it wouldn’t wait. A block down Baiitsu,

toward the port, stood a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow

brick. Its windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was

visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the main entrance

offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms. If the place had

another name, Case didn’t know it; it was always referred to as Cheap

Hotel. You reached it through an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited

at the foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an

afterthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case climbed

into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked length of rigid magnetic

tape.

Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he’d arrived in

Chiba, but he’d never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places.

The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage

were scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the

lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistolgrip as the cage

slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent

jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served

the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.

Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager

sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white fiberglass

coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of

coffins, ten coffins on a side. Case nodded in the boy’s direction and limped

across the plastic grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed

with cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked when

it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key.

The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged his

way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long,

the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed

his key into the slot and waited for verification from the house computer.

Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a

creak of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling the

hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated the manual

latch.

There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket

computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The cooler contained

the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice, carefully wrapped in paper to

delay evaporation, and a spun aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown

temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin’s .22 from his

pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The

coffin’s terminal was molded into one concave wall, opposite a panel listing

house rules in seven languages. Case took the pink handset from its cradle

and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times,

then hung up. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi

wasn’t taking calls.

He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.

A woman answered, something in Japanese.

“Snake Man there?”

“Very good to hear from you,” said Snake Man, coming in on an

extension. “I’ve been expecting your call.”

“I got the music you wanted.” Glancing at the cooler.

“I’m very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you

front?”

“Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . . .”

Snake Man hung up.

“You shit,” Case said to the humming receiver. He stared at the cheap

little pistol.

“Iffy,” he said, “it’s all looking very iffy tonight.”

CASE WALKED INTO the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands in the pockets

of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other the aluminum flask.

Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from a beer

pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh tilted against the wall

on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid called Kurt was on the bar, tending a

thin crowd of mostly silent drunks. Ratz’s plastic arm buzzed as he raised

the pitcher and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. “You look

bad, friend artiste,” he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.

“I’m doing just fine,” said Case, and grinned like a skull. “Super fine.”

He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands still in his pockets.

“And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of

booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?”

“Why don’t you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?”

“Proof against fear and being alone,” the bartender continued. “Listen

to the fear. Maybe it’s your friend.”

“You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz?

Somebody hurt?”

“Crazy cut a security man.” He shrugged. “A girl, they say.”

“I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I . . .”

“Ah.” Ratz’s mouth narrowed, compressed into a single line. He was

looking past Case, toward the entrance. “I think you are about to.”

Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window. The speed

sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery with sweat.

“Herr Wage,” Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manipulator as if he

expected it to be shaken. “How great a pleasure. Too seldom do you honor

us.”

Case turned his head and looked up into Wage’s face. It was a tanned

and forgettable mask. The eyes were vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants.

Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on

either wrist. He was flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men,

their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.

“How you doing, Case?”

“Gentlemen,” said Ratz, picking up the table’s heaped ashtray in his

pink plastic claw, “I want no trouble here.” The ashtray was made of thick,

shatterproof plastic, and advertised Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly,

butts and shards of green plastic cascading onto the tabletop. “You

understand?”

“Hey, sweetheart,” said one of the joeboys, “you wanna try that thing

on me?”

“Don’t bother aiming for the legs, Kurt,” Ratz said, his tone

conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian

standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun at the trio. The

thing’s barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of glass

filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist. The skeletal magazine

revealed five fat orange cartridges, subsonic sandbag jellies.

“Technically nonlethal,” said Ratz.

“Hey, Ratz,” Case said, “I owe you one.”

The bartender shrugged. “Nothing, you owe me. These,” and he

glowered at Wage and the joeboys, “should know better. You don’t take

anybody off in the Chatsubo.”

Wage coughed. “So who’s talking about taking anybody off? We just

wanna talk business. Case and me, we work together.”

Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and levelled it at Wage’s crotch.

“I hear you wanna do me.” Ratz’s pink claw closed around the pistol and

Case let his hand go limp.

“Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig

or something? What’s this shit I’m trying to kill you?” Wage turned to the

boy on his left. “You two go back to the Namban. Wait for me.”

Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely deserted

except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis, who was curled at the foot

of a barstool. The barrel of the Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door,

then swung back to cover Wage. The magazine of Case’s pistol clattered on

the table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out of the

chamber.

“Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?” Wage asked.

Linda.

“Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?”

The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.

“Get him out of here,” Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting on the edge

of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his lap, lighting a cigarette.

Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a bag of wet

sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out of his pocket and

handed it to Wage. “All I got. Pituitaries. Get you five hundred if you move

it fast. Had the rest of my roll in some RAM, but that’s gone by now.”

“You okay, Case?” The flask had already vanished behind a gunmetal

lapel. “I mean, fine, this’ll square us, but you look bad. Like hammered shit.

You better go somewhere and sleep.”

“Yeah.” He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him. “Well, I had

this fifty, but I gave it to somebody.” He giggled. He picked up the .22’s

magazine and the one loose cartridge and dropped them into one pocket,

then put the pistol in the other. “I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back.”

“Go home,” said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with something

like embarrassment. “Artiste. Go home.”

He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered his way

past the plastic doors.

“BITCH,” HE SAID to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei the holograms

were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon was already cold and

dead. He sipped thick black coffee from a street vendor’s foam thimble and

watched the sun come up. “You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for

people who like the way down.” But that wasn’t it, really, and he was

finding it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just

wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy it for her, if

she could find the right fence. And that business with the fifty; she’d almost

turned it down, knowing she was about to rip him for the rest of what he

had.

When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on the desk.

Different textbook. “Good buddy,” Case called across the plastic turf, “you

don’t need to tell me. I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said she had

my key. Nice little tip for you, say fifty New ones?” The boy put down his

book. “Woman,” Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with his

thumb. “Silk.” He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back, nodded. “Thanks,

asshole,” Case said.

On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She’d messed it up

somehow when she’d fiddled it, he thought. Beginner. He knew where to

rent a blackbox that would open anything in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents

came on as he crawled in.

“Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday night

special you rented from the waiter?”

She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin. She had

her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox muzzle of a

flechette pistol emerged from her hands.

“That you in the arcade?” He pulled the hatch down. “Where’s

Linda?”

“Hit that latch switch.”

He did.

“That your girl? Linda?”

He nodded.

“She’s gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What about the gun,

man?” She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of

black boots deep in the temperfoam.

“I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets back to him for

half what I paid. You want the money?”

“No.”

“Want some dry ice? All I got, right now.”

“What got into you tonight? Why’d you pull that scene at the arcade? I

had to mess up this rentacop came after me with nunchucks.”

“Linda said you were gonna kill me.”

“Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here.”

“You aren’t with Wage?”

She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset,

sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale

skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The

fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished

burgundy. The nails looked artificial. “I think you screwed up, Case. I

showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture.”

“So what do you want, lady?” He sagged back against the hatch.

“You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My

name’s Molly. I’m collecting you for the man I work for. Just wants to talk,

is all. Nobody wants to hurt you.”

“That’s good.”

“ ’Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it’s just the way I’m

wired.” She wore tight black gloveleather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut

from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light. “If I put this dartgun

away, will you be easy, Case? You look like you like to take stupid

chances.”

“Hey, I’m very easy. I’m a pushover, no problem.”

“That’s fine, man.” The fletcher vanished into the black jacket.

“Because you try to fuck around with me, you’ll be taking one of the

stupidest chances of your whole life.”

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and

with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades

slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.

She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

TWO

AFTER A YEAR of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the Chiba

Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A white

Braun coffeemaker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels that

opened onto a narrow balcony.

“Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it.” She took off her

black jacket; the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder

rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each

shoulder. Bulletproof, Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug.

His arms and legs felt like they were made out of wood.

“Case.” He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. “My name is

Armitage.” The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless

and muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case

think of bleach. “Sun’s up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.”

Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the

scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation ricepaper wall. He

saw the angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man

smiled.

“Get your coffee, Case,” Molly said. “You’re okay, but you’re not

going anywhere ’til Armitage has his say.” She sat crosslegged on a silk

futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without bothering to look at it.

Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table and refilled his cup.

“Too young to remember the war, aren’t you, Case?” Armitage ran a

large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet

flashed on his wrist. “Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia,

Case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Screaming Fist, Case. You’ve heard the name.”

“Some kind of run, wasn’t it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus with

virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out.”

He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window and looked

out over Tokyo Bay. “That isn’t true. One unit made it back to Helsinki,

Case.”

Case shrugged, sipped coffee.

“You’re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to

crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault

on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight,

a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The

Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.”

“Icebreakers,” Case said, over the rim of the red mug.

“Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics.”

“Problem is, mister, I’m no jockey now, so I think I’ll just be

going. . . .”

“I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind.”

“You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You’re rich enough to

hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here, is all. I’m never gonna

punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else.” He crossed to the

window and looked down. “That’s where I live now.”

“Our profile says you’re trying to con the street into killing you when

you’re not looking.”

“Profile?”

“We’ve built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your

aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You’re suicidal,

Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical

projection says you’ll need a new pancreas inside a year.”

“ ‘We.’ ” He met the faded blue eyes. “ ‘We’ who?”

“What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural

damage, Case?” Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved

from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that

this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage wouldn’t speak again.

Case’s dreams always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was

over.

“What would you say, Case?”

Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.

“I’d say you were full of shit.”

Armitage nodded.

“Then I’d ask what your terms were.”

“Not very different than what you’re used to, Case.”

“Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,” Molly said from her futon,

the components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive

puzzle. “He’s coming apart at the seams.”

“Terms,” Case said, “and now. Right now.”

He was still shivering. He couldn’t stop shivering.

THE CLINIC WAS nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek

pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place

from the round he’d made his first month in Chiba.

“Scared, Case. You’re real scared.” It was Sunday afternoon and he

stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green

bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a

large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.

“It’ll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like

he’s gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he’s giving

them to tell them how to do it. He’ll put them three years ahead of the

competition. You got any idea what that’s worth?” She hooked thumbs in

the beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered

heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes were sheathed in bright

Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an

insect calm.

“You’re street samurai,” he said. “How long you work for him?”

“Couple of months.”

“What about before that?”

“For somebody else. Working girl, you know?”

He nodded.

“Funny, Case.”

“What’s funny?”

“It’s like I know you. That profile he’s got. I know how you’re wired.”

“You don’t know me, sister.”

“You’re okay, Case. What got you, it’s just called bad luck.”

“How about him? He okay, Molly?” The robot crab moved toward

them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might

have been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it

fired a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.

“What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass.” The crab

had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision,

the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back, but

the bronze limbs soon righted it.

Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel

waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for

cigarettes. “In your shirt,” she said.

“You want to answer my question?” He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan

from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that

looked as though it belonged on an operating table.

“Well, I’ll tell you, the man’s definitely onto something. He’s got big

money now, and he’s never had it before, and he gets more all the time.”

Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth. “Or maybe, maybe

something’s onto him. . . .” She shrugged.

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I know I don’t know who or what we’re really

working for.”

He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning,

he’d gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours. Then he’d taken a

long and pointless walk along the port’s security perimeter, watching the

gulls turn circles beyond the chainlink. If she’d followed him, she’d done a

good job of it. He’d avoided Night City. He’d waited in the coffin for

Armitage’s call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a

gymnast’s body and conjurer’s hands.

“If you’ll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you.” The

technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if

Case would follow.

COLD STEEL ODOR. Ice caressed his spine.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading

down corridors of television sky.

Voices.

Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain

beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . . .

HOLD STILL. DON’T move.

And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred

faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is

poisoned silver, beyond chainlink and the prison of the skull.

Goddamn don’t you move.

Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of the matrix,

and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.

“Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!”

She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. “You

don’t lie still, I’ll slit your fucking throat. You’re still full of endorphin

inhibitors.”

HE WOKE AND found her stretched beside him in the dark.

His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain

midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage

of the Sprawl’s towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving

toward him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass. . . .

“Case? It’s Wednesday, Case.” She moved, rolling over, reaching

across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal

from a bottle of water and drink. “Here.” She put the bottle in his hand. “I

can see in the dark, Case. Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.”

“My back hurts.”

“That’s where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood, too.

Blood ’cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new

tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff, I dunno. Lot of injections.

They didn’t have to open anything up for the main show.” She settled back

beside him. “It’s 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic

nerve.”

He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm

water spraying his chest and thighs.

“I gotta punch deck,” he heard himself say. He was groping for his

clothes. “I gotta know. . . .”

She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. “Sorry,

hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if

you jacked in now. Doctor’s orders. Besides, they figure it worked. Check

you in a day or so.” He lay down again.

“Where are we?”

“Home. Cheap Hotel.”

“Where’s Armitage?”

“Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We’re out of here

soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl.” She touched his

shoulder. “Roll over. I give a good massage.”

He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers

against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back,

kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her

fingers brushed his neck.

“How come you’re not at the Hilton?”

She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently

encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a

minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather

of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself

harden against the temperfoam.

His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He

raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her

down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek.

He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.

“It’s okay,” she said, “I can see.” Sound of the jeans peeling down. She

struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across

him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses.

“Don’t,” she said, “fingerprints.”

Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his

thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As

she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces,

fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his

back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping

down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring

blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were

shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs

were strong and wet against his hips.

ON NINSEI, A thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the

motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko

parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in

the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar.

“You seen Wage, Ratz?”

“Not tonight.” Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.

“You see him, tell him I got his money.”

“Luck changing, my artiste?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“WELL, I GOTTA SEE this guy,” Case said, watching his reflection in her

glasses. “I got biz to cancel out of.”

“Armitage won’t like it, I let you out of my sight.” She stood beneath

Deane’s melting clock, hands on her hips.

“The guy won’t talk to me if you’re there. Deane I don’t give two shits

about. He takes care of himself. But I got people who’ll just go under if I

walk out of Chiba cold. It’s my people, you know?”

Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.

“I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and

Asakuza, and they’ll go down, understand?” he lied, his hand on the

shoulder of her black jacket. “Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?”

“Not what I’m paid for.”

“What you’re paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends die

because you’re too literal about your instructions is something else.”

“Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You’re going in there to check us out

with your smuggler.” She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered

Kandinsky coffee table.

“Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is

definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head.

What is this about, exactly?” Deane’s ghostly cough seemed to hang in the

air between them.

“Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I’ll be coming in alone.”

“You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Okay,” she said. “Go. But five minutes. Any more and I’ll come in

and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you’re at it, you try to

figure something out.”

“What’s that?”

“Why I’m doing you the favor.” She turned and walked out, past the

stacked white modules of preserved ginger.

“Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?” asked Julie.

“Julie, she’s gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?”

The bolts worked. “Slowly, Case,” said the voice.

“Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,” Case said, taking

his place in the swivel chair.

“It’s on all the time,” Deane said mildly, taking a gun from behind the

exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it carefully at

Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a

nub. The front of the trigger-guard had been cut away and the grips

wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked

very strange in Deane’s manicured pink hands. “Just taking care, you

understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want.”

“I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody.”

“What’s moving, old son?” Deane’s shirt was candy-striped cotton, the

collar white and rigid, like porcelain.

“Me, Julie. I’m leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?”

“Go-to on whom, old son?”

“Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.”

Deane put the pistol down. “Sit still, Case.” He tapped something out

on a lap terminal. “It seems as though you know as much as my net does,

Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the

Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening

their allies from the likes of me. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Now,

history. You said history.” He picked up the gun again, but didn’t point it

directly at Case. “What sort of history?”

“The war. You in the war, Julie?”

“The war? What’s there to know? Lasted three weeks.”

“Screaming Fist.”

“Famous. Don’t they teach you history these days? Great bloody

postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your

brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the

bunkers, all of that . . . great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young

flesh in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians’

defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons.

Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.” Deane shrugged. “Turkey

shoot for Ivan.”

“Any of those guys make it out?”

“Christ,” Deane said, “it’s been bloody years. . . . Though I do think a

few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. Helicopter, you

know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn’t have entry codes, of course, and shot

hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special Forces types.”

Deane sniffed. “Bloody hell.”

Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.

“I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,” Deane said, putting the gun

down. “Lovely place, Lisbon.”

“In the service, Julie?”

“Hardly. Though I did see action.” Deane smiled his pink smile.

“Wonderful what a war can do for one’s markets.”

“Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.”

“Hardly, Case. And goodbye.”

AND LATER HE’D tell himself that the evening at Sammi’s had felt wrong

from the start, that even as he’d followed Molly along that corridor,

shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam cups, he’d

sensed it. Linda’s death, waiting. . . .

They’d gone to the Namban, after he’d seen Deane, and paid off his

debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage’s New Yen. Wage had liked that, his

boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case’s side with a kind of

ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move.

Then he’d taken her back to the Chat for a drink.

“Wasting your time, cowboy,” Molly said, when Case took an octagon

from the pocket of his jacket.

“How’s that? You want one?” He held the pill out to her.

“Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had

them designed to bypass that shit.” She tapped the octagon with one

burgundy nail. “You’re biochemically incapable of getting off on

amphetamine or cocaine.”

“Shit,” he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.

“Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing’ll happen.”

He did. Nothing did.

Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.

“Sammi’s,” Ratz said.

“I’ll pass,” Case said, “I hear they kill each other down there.”

An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white t-

shirt and baggy rugby shorts.

Sammi’s was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse, taut gray

fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a door at

either end, was a crude airlock preserving the pressure differential that

supported the dome. Fluorescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling

at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close

with the smell of sweat and concrete.

None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the

towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers

to a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of

projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above

the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata of

cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by

the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of the

blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.

Reflected colors flowed across Molly’s lenses as the men circled. The

holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held were

just under a meter long. The knife-fighter’s grip is the fencer’s grip, Case

remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives

seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency

through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the men

waited for an opening. Molly’s upturned face was smooth and still,

watching.

“I’ll go find us some food,” Case said. She nodded, lost in

contemplation of the dance.

He didn’t like this place.

He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.

The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City

crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena

had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered

briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu.

Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.

He’d made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the food

stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of beer.

Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one figure’s chest.

Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over his knuckles.

Seven days and he’d jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he’d see the

matrix.

Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.

Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of

sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn’t

worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on

the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a

new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy. . . .

Hot tears blurred his vision.

Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the

crowd was screaming, rising, screaming—as one figure crumpled, the

hologram fading, flickering. . . .

Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep

breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him, her gray eyes blind

with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.

And gone. Into shadow.

Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after

her. He might have called her name, but he’d never be sure.

Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete

beneath the thin soles of his shoes.

Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again

the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as

he ran.

Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.

He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair

lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the

stage, a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy

smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third

beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his

throat like a dowser’s wand.

The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions.

Molly’s fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once,

convulsively, and toppled across Case’s legs.

He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down,

expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He

found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed.

There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner’s

name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white

sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.

Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking.

Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor’s image above the ring.

Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed

around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on,

feeling nothing.

“Case.” Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. “You okay?”

Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.

He shook his head.

“Fight’s over, Case. Time to go home.”

He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where something was

dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Friends of your tight

friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven’t done too well for friends in this

town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did

you, man. He’d fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there said

they got onto her when she was trying to fence your RAM. Just cheaper for

them to kill her and take it. Save a little money. . . . I got the one who had

the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make

sure.” Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.

Case felt as though his brain were jammed. “Who,” he said, “who sent

them?”

She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that

her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet

sounds and died.

AFTER THE POSTOPERATIVE check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port.

Armitage was waiting. He’d chartered a hovercraft. The last Case saw of

Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over the

black water and the drifting shoals of waste.

PART 2

THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION

THREE

HOME.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand

megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta

burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to

overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up

your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million

megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown

Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old

core of Atlanta . . .

CASE WOKE FROM a dream of airports, of Molly’s dark leathers moving

ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly. . . . He

watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an

hour before dawn.

Somewhere down in the Sprawl’s ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a

column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent, gliding over

its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down into

subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise

from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.

Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an

expanse of very new pink temperfoam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through

the soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been

replaced with chipboard, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a

few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her

breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war

plane’s fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer’s.

The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the

wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it.

Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls

were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He

knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in

the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art.

He was home.

He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood,

some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam,

another room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries

old. Molly back from the canal’s edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage

off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square

to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream.

Shopping. She’d taken him shopping.

He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his

feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly’s: neatly

folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was

stuffed with things he didn’t remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim

deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he

discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper.

The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell—to

stick upright in a crack in the parquet.

“Souvenir,” Molly said. “I noticed you were always looking at ’em.”

He turned and saw her sitting cross-legged on the bed, sleepily scratching

her stomach with burgundy nails.

“SOMEONE’S COMING LATER to secure the place,” Armitage said. He stood in

the open doorway with an old-fashioned magnetic key in his hand. Molly

was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag.

“I can do it,” she said. “I got enough gear already. Infrascan perimeter,

screamers . . .”

“No,” he said, closing the door. “I want it tight.”

“Suit yourself.” She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black

cotton pants.

“You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?” Case asked, from where he sat, his

back against a wall.

Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and

military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian

suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special

Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the

routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the

past decade’s leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened

the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.

“Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,”

Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee.

“That number you had them do on my pancreas, that’s like a cop routine.”

Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of

Case. “You’re a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me.”

“Should I?” Case blew noisily on his coffee.

“You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you

from a dangerous dependency.”

“Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.”

“Good, because you have a new one.”

“How’s that?” Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling.

“You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main

arteries, Case. They’re dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are

dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You’re already familiar with the

effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in

Memphis.”

Case blinked up at the smiling mask.

“You have time to do what I’m hiring you for, Case, but that’s all. Do

the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond

without opening the sacs. Then you’ll need a blood change. Otherwise, the

sacs melt and you’re back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need

us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the

gutter.”

Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.

“Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find

there.” Armitage handed him the magnetic key. “Go on. You’ll enjoy this,

Case. Like Christmas morning.”

SUMMER IN THE Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a

field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.

He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete

fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his

life. First a child with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready at

his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case

remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose

glow of the dawn geodesics.

He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin

black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was

different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and

perfume and fresh summer sweat.

With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.

They’d left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam

packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads.

The Ono-Sendai; next year’s most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony

monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.

Armitage had only waited for Case’s approval of each piece.

“Where’d he go?” Case had asked Molly.

“He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it. Let’s go

down to the street.” She’d zipped herself into an old surplus vest with a

dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on a huge pair of black plastic

sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets.

“You know about that toxin shit, before?” he asked her, by the

fountain. She shook her head. “You think it’s true?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.”

“You know any way I can find out?”

“No,” she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence.

“That kind of kink’s too subtle to show up on a scan.” Then her fingers

moved again: wait. “And you don’t care that much anyway. I saw you

stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.” She laughed.

“So what’s he got on you? How’s he got the working girl kinked?”

“Professional pride, baby, that’s all.” And again the sign for silence.

“We’re gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon. Probably kill

you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long. Yeah, come on,

we’ll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real breakfast.”

LIFELESS NEON SPELLED out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of

glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that had lodged between his

front teeth. He’d given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs

in the ribs and the sign for silence were all he’d gotten in reply. She talked

about the season’s fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in

California he’d never heard of.

He looked around the deserted dead-end street. A sheet of newsprint

went cartwheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side;

something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered

through the window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn’t his Sprawl, he

decided. She’d led him through a dozen bars and clubs he’d never seen

before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.

Maintaining connections.

Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO

HOLOGRAFIX.

The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it, Molly’s

hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he couldn’t follow.

He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing the tip of the forefinger. The

door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a

clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with

shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had

grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out

individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts

of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes,

a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded

lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded

into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed

her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door

close behind them. He didn’t look back.

The tunnel ended with an ancient army blanket tacked across a

doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.

Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored with

white hospital tile molded in a nonslip pattern of small raised disks. In the

center stood a square, white-painted wooden table and four white folding

chairs.

The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the

blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a

wind tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow

skull, and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn’t quite a

smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and

held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked,

and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at a

slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and

saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He

helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained

fingers secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan began to

purr.

“Time,” the man said, straightening up, “and counting. You know the

rate, Moll.”

“We need a scan, Finn. For implants.”

“So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten

up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full three-sixty.” Case watched her

rotate between two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man

took a small monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. “Something new in

your head, yeah. Silicon, coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your

glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons.

Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that’s your business, right?

Same with your claws.”

“Get over here, Case.” He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor.

“Turn around. Slow.”

“Guy’s a virgin.” The man shrugged. “Some cheap dental work, is all.”

“You read for biologicals?” Molly unzipped her green vest and took

off the dark glasses.

“You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we’ll run a little

biopsy.” He laughed, showing more of his yellow teeth. “Nah. Finn’s word,

sweetmeat, you got no little bugs, no cortex bombs. You want me to shut

the screen down?”

“Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we’ll want full

screen for as long as we want it.”

“Hey, that’s fine by the Finn, Moll. You’re only paying by the second.”

They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white

chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. “We talk now.

This is as private as I can afford.”

“What about?”

“What we’re doing.”

“What are we doing?”

“Working for Armitage.”

“And you’re saying this isn’t for his benefit?”

“Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I’ve seen the rest of our shopping

list, once. You ever work with the dead?”

“No.” He watched his reflection in her glasses. “I could, I guess. I’m

good at what I do.” The present tense made him nervous.

“You know that the Dixie Flatline’s dead?”

He nodded. “Heart, I heard.”

“You’ll be working with his construct.” She smiled. “Taught you the

ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole.”

“Somebody’s got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?” Now Case sat,

and rested his elbows on the table. “I can’t see it. He’d never have sat still

for it.”

“Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass.”

“Quine dead too?”

“No such luck. He’s in Europe. He doesn’t come into this.”

“Well, if we can get the Flatline, we’re home free. He was the best.

You know he died braindeath three times?”

She nodded.

“Flatlined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. ‘Boy, I was daid.’ ”

“Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing Armitage

since I signed on. But it doesn’t feel like a zaibatsu, a government, or some

Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to go off

to Chiba, pick up a pillhead who’s making one last wobble through the

burnout belt, and trade a program for the operation that’ll fix him up. We

coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what the market was ready

to pay for that surgical program. You were good, but not that good. . . .”

She scratched the side of her nose.

“Obviously makes sense to somebody,” he said. “Somebody big.”

“Don’t let me hurt your feelings.” She grinned. “We’re gonna be

pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flatline’s construct.

Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault uptown. Tighter than an eel’s ass,

Case. Now, Sense/Net, they got all their new material for the fall season

locked in there too. Steal that and we’d be richer than shit. But no, we gotta

get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird.”

“Yeah, it’s all weird. You’re weird, this hole’s weird, and who’s the

weird little gopher outside in the hall?”

“Finn’s an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software. This

privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him be our tech here, so

when he shows up later, you never saw him. Got it?”

“So what’s Armitage got dissolving inside you?”

“I’m an easy make.” She smiled. “Anybody any good at what they do,

that’s what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.”

He stared at her. “So tell me what you know about Armitage.”

“For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist.

I checked. But that doesn’t mean much. He doesn’t look like any of the pics

of the guys who got out.” She shrugged. “Big deal. And starters is all I got.”

She drummed her nails on the back of the chair. “But you are a cowboy,

aren’t you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.” She smiled.

“He’d kill me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real bad. Besides,

you’re a clever john, no? You can winkle him, sure.”

“What else is on that list you mentioned?”

“Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name of Peter

Riviera. Real ugly customer.”

“Where’s he?”

“Dunno. But he’s one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile.” She made a

face. “Godawful.” She stood up and stretched, catlike. “So we got an axis

going, boy? We’re together in this? Partners?”

Case looked at her. “I gotta lotta choice, huh?”

She laughed. “You got it, cowboy.”

“THE MATRIX HAS its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over,

“in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial

jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of

mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of

logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals

wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks

and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily

by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught

mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from

the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.

Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and

constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

“What’s that?” Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.

“Kid’s show.” A discontinuous flood of images as the selector cycled.

“Off,” he said to the Hosaka.

“You want to try now, Case?”

Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside

him. “You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone. . . .” He

shook his head.

“No. Stay, doesn’t matter.” He settled the black terry sweatband across

his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. He stared

back at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop

window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He

glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he’d hung her gift, tacking it

there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in

from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled

from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented

mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now—

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now—

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray.

Expanding—

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding

of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending

to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern

Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi

Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of

military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant

fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

MOLLY WAS GONE when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He

checked the time. He’d been in cyberspace for five hours. He carried the

Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables and collapsed across the bedslab,

pulling Molly’s black silk sleeping bag over his head.

The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped twice. “Entry

requested,” it said. “Subject is cleared per my program.”

“So open it.” Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door

opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.

“Christ,” said a hoarse voice, “I know that bitch can see in the

dark. . . .” A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. “Turn the lights

on, okay?” Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.

“I’m the Finn,” said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.

“Case.”

“Pleased to meecha, I’m sure. I’m doing some hardware for your boss,

it looks like.” The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket and lit one.

The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the worktable

and glanced at the Ono-Sendai. “Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here’s your

problem, kid.” He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket,

flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rectangle from the

envelope. “Goddamn factory prototypes,” he said, tossing the thing down

on the table. “Cast ’em into a block of polycarbon, can’t get in with a laser

without frying the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows

what else. We’ll get in, but there’s no rest for the wicked, right?” He folded

the envelope with great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket.

“What is it?”

“It’s a flipflop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can

access live or recorded simstim without having to jack out of the matrix.”

“What for?”

“I haven’t got a clue. Know I’m fitting Moll for a broadcast rig,

though, so it’s probably her sensorium you’ll access.” The Finn scratched

his chin. “So now you get to find out just how tight those jeans really are,

huh?”

FOUR

CASE SAT IN the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead,

watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid

overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor

screen.

Cowboys didn’t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically

a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara

dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the

cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human

sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as

a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited,

of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment,

you didn’t feel it.

The screen bleeped a two-second warning.

The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of

fiberoptics.

And one and two and—

Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. Smooth, he

thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. . . .

Then he keyed the new switch.

The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and

color. . . . She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending

discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of

music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume,

patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to

control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the

passenger behind her eyes.

The glasses didn’t seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if

the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked

the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.

Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed

continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out

of her way, stepped sideways, made room.

“How you doing, Case?” He heard the words and felt her form them.

She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk.

The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was

one-way. He had no way to reply.

Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane.

Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to

find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.

The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was

instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging

to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows.

Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses

sharp and bright.

He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations

with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that

she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew

the way she’d moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual

grunt of unity when he’d entered her, and that she liked her coffee black,

afterward. . . .

Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes that

lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central

hall. The clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all

seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn’t

focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of

slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under

oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard. Molly went to

the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a

shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft

protruding from the socket behind his ear.

“Larry, you in, man?” She positioned herself in front of him. The boy’s

eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from

his socket with a dirty thumbnail.

“Hey, Larry.”

“Molly.” He nodded.

“I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.”

Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and

flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand

hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest,

and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed.

“Molly’s got a rider,” he said, “and Larry doesn’t like that.”

“Hey,” she said, “I didn’t know you were so . . . sensitive. I’m

impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.”

“I know you, lady?” The blank look returned. “You looking to buy

some softs?”

“I’m looking for the Moderns.”

“You got a rider, Molly. This says.” He tapped the black splinter.

“Somebody else using your eyes.”

“My partner.”

“Tell your partner to go.”

“Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.”

“What are you talking about, lady?”

“Case, you take off,” she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in

the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few

seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace.

“Panther Moderns,” he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. “Five

minute precis.”

“Ready,” the computer said.

It wasn’t a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in

since he’d been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed

of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks,

and then vanish utterly. “Go,” he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of

libraries, journals, and news services.

The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first

assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy’s face snipped from another

image and glued to a photograph of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes,

epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne

across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved,

flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator.

His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the

scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight onepiece. Mimetic

polycarbon.

Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and

school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.

“Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,”

someone said, “it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you

continue to insist that this phenomenon isn’t a form of terrorism.”

Dr. Rambali smiled. “There is always a point at which the terrorist

ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may

well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of

the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately

media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in

their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which

media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical

intent. . . .”

“Skip it,” Case said.

CASE MET HIS first Modern two days after he’d screened the Hosaka’s

precis. The Moderns, he’d decided, were a contemporary version of the Big

Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA

at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various

short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther

Moderns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If the technology had

been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with

microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The

Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.

The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from

the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft

grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and

hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever

seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large

animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He’d seen that

before.

“You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you,” Molly said. Case

nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice.

This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to

eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the

long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the

chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and

reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious

traps, and mapped the route he’d take through Sense/Net’s ice. It was good

ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under

Molly’s shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the

skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke.

He’d go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was

cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days.

And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was off on one

of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of Moderns, images of

Chiba came flooding back. Faces and Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a

confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she’d

ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for

nine straight hours.

The cutting of Sense/Net’s ice took a total of nine days.

“I said a week,” Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when

Case showed him his plan for the run. “You took your own good time.”

“Balls,” Case said, smiling at the screen. “That’s good work,

Armitage.”

“Yes,” Armitage admitted, “but don’t let it go to your head. Compared

to what you’ll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy.”

“LOVE YOU, CAT Mother,” whispered the Panther Modern’s link man. His

voice was modulated static in Case’s headset. “Atlanta, Brood. Looks go.

Go, got it?” Molly’s voice was slightly clearer.

“To hear is to obey.” The Moderns were using some kind of

chickenwire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man’s scrambled signal

off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above

Manhattan. They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private

joke, and their choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly’s

signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish epoxy-ed to

the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building.

Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston to

Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone managed to

intercept Molly’s signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip

the Moderns. If she remained in the building for more than twenty minutes,

it was highly unlikely she’d be coming out at all.

Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place, and

scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of

what the Panther Moderns planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security

people. His job was to make sure the intrusion program he’d written would

link with the Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the

countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.

He jacked in and triggered his program. “Mainline,” breathed the link

man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata

of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He hit the simstim and flipped into

her sensorium.

The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall

of gold-flecked mirror in the building’s vast white lobby, chewing gum,

apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of

sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably

like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of Tally

Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants

cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She

grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could

feel the micropore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it:

the radio, the simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her

neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in

the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of

tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the

peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they

were partially extruded, then retracted.

He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched

as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of

his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent

planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.

The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his

entry as a routine transfer from the consortium’s Los Angeles complex. He

was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the

gate’s code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it

arrived.

He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous circular

reception desk at the rear of the lobby.

12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.

AT MIDNIGHT, SYNCHED with the chip behind Molly’s eye, the link man in

Jersey had given his command. “Mainline.” Nine Moderns, scattered along

two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG

from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and

drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police

departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information

that an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken

credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive

agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net

Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been

shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five

percent of experimental subjects.

CASE HIT THE switch as his program surged through the gates of the

subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net research library. He

found himself stepping into an elevator.

“Excuse me, but are you an employee?” The guard raised his

eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. “No,” she said, driving the first two

knuckles of her right hand into the man’s solar plexus. As he doubled over,

clawing for the beeper on his belt, she slammed his head sideways, against

the wall of the elevator.

Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and

STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a blackbox from her coat pocket

and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the lock that secured the panel’s

circuitry.

THE PANTHER MODERNS allowed four minutes for their first move to take

effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation.

This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building’s internal video

system.

At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds

in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net

employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the

screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like

some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted,

elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish

clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished.

Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building’s

water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware,

something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash. . . . The audio track,

its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed,

was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a

substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal

growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive,

accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.

At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium

held just over three thousand employees. At five minutes after midnight, as

the Moderns’ message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net

Pyramid screamed.

Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility

of Blue Nine in the building’s ventilation system, were converging on the

Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid

Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker’s.

CASE TRIGGERED HIS second program. A carefully engineered virus attacked

the code fabric screening primary custodial commands for the sub-basement

that housed the Sense/Net research materials. “Boston,” Molly’s voice came

across the link, “I’m downstairs.” Case switched and saw the blank wall of

the elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the

shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with micropore. She knelt and

peeled the tape away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic

polycarbon as she unfolded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat,

threw it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on over the

white mesh top.

12:06:26.

Case’s virus had bored a window through the library’s command ice.

He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with

color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the

nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed

unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through

Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung

with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had

purchased from a mid-echelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He

began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks.

Here. This one.

Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him

starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a subprogram that effected

certain alterations in the core custodial commands.

Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the

window.

Done.

IN THE SENSE/NET lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly behind a low

rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video camera. They both wore

chameleon suits. “Tacticals are spraying foam barricades now,” one noted,

speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. “Rapids are still trying to land

their copter.”

CASE HIT THE simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone.

Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath

coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-

hot line of pain fading in his left thigh.

“What’s happening, Brood?” he asked the link man.

“I dunno, Cutter. Mother’s not talking. Wait.”

Case’s program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of crimson neon

extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline of

his icebreaker. He didn’t have time to wait. Taking a deep breath, he flipped

again.

Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on the corridor

wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step took her over an

outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with fresh blood. Glimpse of a

shattered fiberglass shockstave. Her vision seemed to have narrowed to a

tunnel. With the third step, Case screamed and found himself back in the

matrix.

“Brood? Boston, baby . . .” Her voice tight with pain. She coughed.

“Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg.”

“What you need now, Cat Mother?” The link man’s voice was

indistinct, nearly lost behind static.

Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against the wall,

taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled through the contents

of the suit’s kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of plastic studded with a

rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three and thumbed them hard against

her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog

came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back arched

convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. She sighed and

slowly relaxed.

“Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I’ll need a medical team when I come

out. Tell my people. Cutter, I’m two minutes from target. Can you hold?”

“Tell her I’m in and holding,” Case said.

Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced back, once,

Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of

them seemed to have no eyes.

“Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat Mother. Foam

barricades. Lobby’s getting juicy.”

“Pretty juicy down here,” she said, swinging herself through a pair of

gray steel doors. “Almost there, Cutter.”

Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his forehead.

He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a

quick sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the Hosaka, and checked

the map of the library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept

through the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that

indicated the location of the Dixie Flatline’s construct. He wondered what it

was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin analog,

she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness

that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes.

Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.

The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the materials

stored here had to be physically removed before they could be interfaced.

Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers.

“Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood,” Case said.

“Five more and ten left, Cat Mother,” the link man said.

She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between two

lockers, her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her. Case wondered

what the Moderns had done to provoke that level of terror. He knew it had

something to do with a hoaxed threat, but he’d been too involved with his

ice to follow Molly’s explanation.

“That’s it,” Case said, but she’d already stopped in front of the cabinet

that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of the Neo-Aztec bookcases

in Julie Deane’s anteroom in Chiba.

“Do it, Cutter,” Molly said.

Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing down the

crimson thread that pierced the library ice. Five separate alarm systems

were convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks

deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked. The

library’s central bank suffered a minute shift in its permanent memory: the

construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before. Checking

for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian would find the

records erased.

The door swung open on silent hinges.

“0467839,” Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit from the

rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault rifle, its surfaces covered

with warning decals and security ratings.

Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.

He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped back into his

program, automatically triggering a full system reversal. The Sense/Net

gates snapped past him as he backed out, subprograms whirling back into

the core of the icebreaker as he passed the gates where they had been

stationed.

“Out, Brood,” he said, and slumped in his chair. After the

concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and still retain

awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days to discover the theft of

the construct. The key would be the deflection of the Los Angeles transfer,

which coincided too neatly with the Modern’s terror run. He doubted that

the three security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live to

talk about it. He flipped.

The elevator, with Molly’s blackbox taped beside the control panel,

remained where she’d left it. The guard still lay curled on the floor. Case

noticed the derm on his neck for the first time. Something of Molly’s, to

keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the blackbox before

punching LOBBY.

As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out of the

crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall with her head. Molly

ignored her, bending over to peel the derm from the guard’s neck. Then she

kicked the white pants and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the dark

glasses after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her forehead.

The construct, in the suit’s kangaroo pocket, dug into her sternum when she

moved. She stepped out.

Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.

The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for

the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the

sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they

were containing a horde of potential killers, were cooperating with an

uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the

main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The

hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the

sound the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby’s marble

floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound.

Neither, apparently, had Molly. “Jesus,” she said, and hesitated. It was

a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of raw and total fear. The

lobby floor was covered with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled

scrolls of yellow printout.

“C’mon, sister. We’re for out.” The eyes of the two Moderns stared out

of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits unable to keep up with

the confusion of shape and color that raged behind them. “You hurt?

C’mon. Tommy’ll walk you.” Tommy handed something to the one who

spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.

“Chicago,” she said, “I’m on my way.” And then she was falling, not

to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some bloodwarm

well, into silence and the dark.

THE PANTHER MODERN leader, who introduced himself as Lupus

Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed

him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case’s worktable

like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage

with hooded eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of

microsofts bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more

pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat’s. Case

watched the suit crawl with color and texture.

“You let it get out of control,” Armitage said. He stood in the center of

the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an expensive-

looking trenchcoat.

“Chaos, Mr. Who,” Lupus Yonderboy said. “That is our mode and

modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not

with you, Mr. Who.” His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige

and pale avocado. “She needed her medical team. She’s with them. We’ll

watch out for her. Everything’s fine.” He smiled again.

“Pay him,” Case said.

Armitage glared at him. “We don’t have the goods.”

“Your woman has it,” Yonderboy said.

“Pay him.”

Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New

Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. “You want to count it?” he asked

Yonderboy.

“No,” the Panther Modern said. “You’ll pay. You’re a Mr. Who. You

pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name.”

“I hope that isn’t a threat,” Armitage said.

“That’s business,” said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the single

pocket on the front of his suit.

The phone rang. Case answered.

“Molly,” he told Armitage, handing him the phone.

THE SPRAWL’S GEODESICS were lightening into predawn gray as Case left

the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn’t sleep. He

was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was in

surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens

dopplered in the distance.

He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather

jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and lighting

another. He tried to imagine Armitage’s toxin sacs dissolving in his

bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It

didn’t seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he’d seen through Molly’s

eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself trying to remember the

faces of the three people he’d killed in Chiba. The men were blanks; the

woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered tricycle-truck with mirrored

windows bounced past him, empty plastic cylinders rattling in its bed.

“Case.”

He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.

“Message for you, Case.” Lupus Yonderboy’s suit cycled through pure

primaries. “Pardon. Not to startle you.”

Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller

than the Modern. “You oughta be careful, Yonderboy.”

“This is the message. Wintermute.” He spelled it out.

“From you?” Case took a step forward.

“No,” Yonderboy said. “For you.”

“Who from?”

“Wintermute,” Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink

hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He

executed a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he

was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right

shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes

winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.

Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back

against peeling brickwork.

Ninsei had been a lot simpler.

FIVE

THE MEDICAL TEAM Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous

condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like

some giant version of Cheap Hotel, each coffin forty meters long. Case met

Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of

one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.

“He says if I kick anything, it’ll fall off.”

“I ran into one of your pals,” he said, “a Modern.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message.” He passed her a paper napkin

with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious

capitals. “He said—” But her hand came up in the jive for silence.

“Get us some crab,” she said.

AFTER LUNCH IN Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease,

they tubed into New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only

brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she

seldom spoke.

A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven

tightly into her hair opened the Finn’s door and led them along the tunnel of

refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else

it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the

pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a

crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the

Sprawl’s waste places.

Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.

Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote

something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and

forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He

made a sign Case didn’t know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience

and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his

battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table

beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the

butts of Partagas.

“Wait,” the Finn said, and left the room.

Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and

speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the

room, fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.

Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a

wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-up salute, and

gestured to Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the

velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket

and punched out an elaborate sequence.

“Honey,” he said to Molly, tucking the console away, “you have got it.

No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?”

“Yonderboy,” Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. “I

did a deal with Larry, on the side.”

“Smart,” the Finn said. “It’s an AI.”

“Slow it down a little,” Case said.

“Berne,” the Finn said, ignoring him. “Berne. It’s got limited Swiss

citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ’53. Built for Tessier-

Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software.”

“What’s in Berne, okay?” Case deliberately stepped between them.

“Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I’ve got the Turing

Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence.”

“That’s all just fine,” Molly said, “but where’s it get us?”

“If Yonderboy’s right,” the Finn said, “this AI is backing Armitage.”

“I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Armitage a little,”

Molly explained, turning to Case. “They have some very weird lines of

communication. Deal was, they’d get my money if they answered one

question: who’s running Armitage?”

“And you think it’s this AI? Those things aren’t allowed any

autonomy. It’ll be the parent corporation, this Tessle . . .”

“Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,” said the Finn. “And I got a little story for you

about them. Wanna hear?” He sat down and hunched forward.

“Finn,” Molly said. “He loves a story.”

“Haven’t ever told anybody this one,” the Finn began.

THE FINN WAS a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In

the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with other

fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade. In

precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and

other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another

man’s story, a man he called Smith.

Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art

dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who’d “gone silicon”—

the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case—and the microsofts he

purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a

dozen chips in his new socket, Smith’s knowledge of the art business was

formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come

to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to

another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had

to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the

subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn

had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. “It smelled,” the

Finn said to Case, “smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful.

Almost too careful.”

Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a

burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit,

having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual

thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago

was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonné over platinum, studded

with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket

microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was

contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy

laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not

in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature

organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a

perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a

curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the

melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year’s tax return.

Smith’s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for

clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing

Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he

said, but he doubted he could get much for it.

When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully,

discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he’d been able to trace it to an

unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in

Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been

commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting

that he was on the track of something noteworthy.

And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in

through the elaborate maze of Smith’s security as though it didn’t exist. A

small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a

vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown

eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently,

almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find

and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been

taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja

said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.

Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head.

And how much, his visitor asked, did you expect to obtain through the sale

of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he’d intended

to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of

a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this

piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy’s death.

“So that was where I came in,” the Finn continued. “Smith knew I

dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that’s where you go for a

quiet go-to that’ll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I

took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He’d just had a very weird

business experience and he’d come out on top, but it didn’t add up. Who’d

paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code

covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it

spook stuff? Smith didn’t think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can

smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found

Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn’t anything, but we got the law

firm. Then he did the lawyer’s ice and we got the family address. Lotta

good it did us.”

Case raised his eyebrows.

“Freeside,” the Finn said. “The spindle. Turns out they own damn near

the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the

cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis.

Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an

S.A., but there hasn’t been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open

market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You’re

looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-orbit family, run

like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital

law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it’s hard to keep track

of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at

a given time.”

“How’s that?” Molly asked.

“Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you’re legally

dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody’s

seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died

in some lab accident. . . .”

“So what happened with your fence?”

“Nothing.” The Finn frowned. “Dropped it. We had a look at this

fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A’s have, and that was it. Jimmy

must’ve gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent

their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.”

He looked at Molly. “The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly

private.”

“You figure they own that ninja, Finn?” Molly asked.

“Smith thought so.”

“Expensive,” she said. “Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja,

Finn?”

“Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.”

“Okay,” Case said, “we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI

named Wintermute. Where’s that get us?”

“Nowhere yet,” Molly said, “but you got a little side gig now.” She

drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He

opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.

“Who’s this?”

“Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns.

Separate deal. Where is it?”

“London,” Case said.

“Crack it.” She laughed. “Earn your keep for a change.”

CASE WAITED FOR a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had

gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline’s construct in her green bag,

and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.

It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired

ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk

responses. . . . The local came booming in along the black induction strip,

fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel’s ceiling. Case shuffled into the

nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of

predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young

office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet

pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips

nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic

lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully

and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like

polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could

stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.

He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar

suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in

contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the

crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the

sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators,

docks, domes. He’d seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had

never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as

easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he

noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left

corner of the ad’s fabric of light: T-A.

He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He’d spent

most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive

beers and watching the cowboys. He’d never touched a deck, then, but he

knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting

the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy.

No other way to learn.

They’d all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the ’Lanta fringes,

who’d survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine—slender, street

level, and the only one going—had little to say about Pauley, other than that

he’d done the impossible. “It was big,” another would-be told Case, for the

price of a beer, “but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net.

Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.” Case stared across the

crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt-sleeves, something leaden about the

shade of his skin.

“Boy,” the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, “I’m like

them huge fuckin’ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains,

one in the head an’ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin’. Hit that

black stuff and ol’ tailbrain jus’ kept right on keepin’ on.”

The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange

group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of

cyberspace. . . .

And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart,

implanted in a POW camp during the war. He’d refused to replace the thing,

saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case

fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the

stairs.

Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her

knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid

micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight

derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist.

An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to

input trodes under the cast.

He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell

directly on the Flatline’s construct. He slotted some ice, connected the

construct, and jacked in.

It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.

He coughed. “Dix? McCoy? That you man?” His throat was tight.

“Hey, bro,” said a directionless voice.

“It’s Case, man. Remember?”

“Miami, joeboy, quick study.”

“What’s the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?”

“Nothin’.”

“Hang on.” He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He

reconnected it. “Dix? Who am I?”

“You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?”

“Ca—your buddy. Partner. What’s happening, man?”

“Good question.”

“Remember being here, a second ago?”

“No.”

“Know how a ROM personality matrix works?”

“Sure, bro, it’s a firmware construct.”

“So I jack it into the bank I’m using, I can give it sequential, real time

memory?”

“Guess so,” said the construct.

“Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?”

“If you say so,” said the construct. “Who are you?”

“Case.”

“Miami,” said the voice, “joeboy, quick study.”

“Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we’re gonna sleaze over to

London grid and access a little data. You game for that?”

“You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?”

SIX

“YOU WANT YOU a paradise,” the Flatline advised, when Case had explained

his situation. “Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.” The

voice recited coordinates as he punched.

They found their paradise, a “pirate’s paradise,” on the jumbled border

of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of

graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint

glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a

dozen arts faculties.

“There,” said the Flatline, “the blue one. Make it out? That’s an entry

code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell’ll get in here soon and read the whole

damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids’ll steal the new ones

tomorrow.”

Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard

phone code. With the Flatline’s help, he connected with the London data

base that Molly claimed was Armitage’s.

“Here,” said the voice, “I’ll do it for you.” The Flatline began to chant

a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses

the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.

“Big deal,” said the Flatline. “No ice at all.”

“Scan this shit,” Case told the Hosaka. “Sift for owner’s personal

history.”

The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a

simple lozenge of white light. “Contents are primarily video recordings of

postwar military trials,” said the distant voice of the Hosaka. “Central figure

is Colonel Willis Corto.”

“Show it already,” Case said.

A man’s face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage’s.

TWO HOURS LATER, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the

temperfoam mold itself against him.

“You find anything?” she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.

“Tell you later,” he said, “I’m wrecked.” He was hungover and

confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a

story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data

and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had

been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case

had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were

audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.

Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the

Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse

bombs, and Corto’s team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their

wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers

Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen

months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their

launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.

“They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,” Case said, and Molly stirred

beside him.

The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the

weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called

Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his

team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the

ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse

guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered

systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.

Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile,

radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell

out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . . .

There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents

concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to

reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique

twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert.

Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with

Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter.

The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility

in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months

for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of

tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already

underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially

dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming

Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.

He’d need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but

that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto’s

shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.

Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify

as he was.

No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials

needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.

Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto’s subsequent

testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a

Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular

portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the

testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers

directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the

emp installations at Kirensk.

His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M

Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal

dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man’s

larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide

strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool

Washington September.

The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage

records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in

Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of

betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his

employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a

hotel and set fire to his room.

Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as

enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of

Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the

gaps longer.

One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical

interrogation, everything had gone gray.

Translated French medical records explained that a man without

identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as

schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government

institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an

experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the

application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were

provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to

program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment.

The record ended there.

Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing

her.

THE TELEPHONE RANG. He pulled it into bed. “Yeah?”

“We’re going to Istanbul,” Armitage said. “Tonight.”

“What does the bastard want?” Molly asked.

“Says we’re going to Istanbul tonight.”

“That’s just wonderful.”

Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.

Molly sat up and turned on the light.

“What about my gear?” Case asked. “My deck.”

“Finn will handle it,” said Armitage, and hung up.

Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but

even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His

clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.

“You hurting?” he asked.

“I could do with another night at Chin’s.”

“Your dentist?”

“You betcha. Very discreet. He’s got half that rack, full clinic. Does

repairs for samurai.” She was zipping her bag. “You ever been to

’Stambul?”

“Couple days, once.”

“Never changes,” she said. “Bad old town.”

“IT WAS LIKE this when we headed for Chiba,” Molly said, staring out the

train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon

warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. “We were in L.A. He came in

and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played

fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was

playing ghost with you in Night City.” She took a silk scarf from the sleeve

of her black jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern

Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting

the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete.

The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case

watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the

rusting shells of refineries.

SEVEN

IT WAS RAINING in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and

unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was

almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks turning to

stare after the car.

“This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman

Istanbul,” purred the Mercedes.

“So it’s gone downhill,” Case said.

“The Hilton’s in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,” Molly said. She settled back

against the car’s gray ultrasuede.

“How come Armitage flies alone?” Case asked. He had a headache.

“ ’Cause you get up his nose. You’re sure getting up mine.”

He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it. He’d used

a sleep derm, on the plane.

The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat

incision, laying the city open. He’d watched the crazy walls of patchwork

wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing projects, more

walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.

The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly

in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue

carpeting.

“Christ,” Molly said. “Rat in a business suit.”

They crossed the lobby.

“How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?” She lowered her

bag beside the armchair. “Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit,

huh?”

The Finn’s upper lips drew back. “Not enough, sweetmeat.” He handed

her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. “You’re registered already.

Honcho’s upstairs.” He looked around. “This town sucks.”

“You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just

pretend it’s Brooklyn or something.” She twirled the key around a finger.

“You here as valet or what?”

“I gotta check out some guy’s implants,” the Finn said.

“How about my deck?” Case asked.

The Finn winced. “Observe the protocol. Ask the boss.”

Molly’s fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of jive.

The Finn watched, then nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, “I know who that is.” She jerked her head in the

direction of the elevators. “Come on, cowboy.” Case followed her with both

bags.

THEIR ROOM MIGHT have been the one in Chiba where he’d first seen

Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see

Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A

few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters

wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still

enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched a dull

black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it disgorged

five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms. They

entered the hotel across the street.

He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him.

She’d left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the

transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room’s light fixture.

He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice.

“Glad you’re up,” Armitage said.

“I’m just. Lady’s still under. Listen, boss, I think it’s maybe time we

have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I’m

doing.”

Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.

“You know as much as you need to. Maybe more.”

“You think so?”

“Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You’ll have a caller in about fifteen

minutes. His name is Terzibashjian.” The phone bleated softly. Armitage

was gone.

“Wake up, baby,” Case said. “Biz.”

“I’ve been awake an hour already.” The mirrors turned.

“We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.”

“You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you’re part Armenian. That’s

the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up.”

Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-

framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a

mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-

shirt. He arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant

cups of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.

“We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy.” He seemed to

stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His eyes

were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut

hair. He smiled. “It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity,

mirror into mirror. . . . You particularly,” he said to her, “must take care. In

Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications.”

Molly bit one of the pastries in half. “It’s my show, Jack,” she said, her

mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. “I know about you.

Stool for the military, right?” Her hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket

and came out with the fletcher. Case hadn’t known she had it.

“Very easy, please,” Terzibashjian said, his white china thimble frozen

centimeters from his lips.

She extended the gun. “Maybe you get the explosives, lots of them, or

maybe you get a cancer. One dart, shitface. You won’t feel it for months.”

“Please. You call this in Ingiliz making me very tight. . . .”

“I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass

out of here.” She put the gun away.

“He is living in Fener, at Küchük Gülhane Djaddesi 14. I have his

tunel route, nightly to the bazaar. He performs most recently at the

Yenishehir Palas Oteli, a modern place in the style turistik, but it has been

arranged that the police have shown a certain interest in these shows. The

Yenishehir management has grown nervous.” He smiled. He smelled of

some metallic aftershave.

“I want to know about the implants,” she said, massaging her thigh, “I

want to know exactly what he can do.”

Terzibashjian nodded. “Worst is how you say in Ingiliz, the

subliminals.” He made the word four careful syllables.

“ON OUR LEFT,” said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy

streets, “is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar.”

Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking

in the wrong direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature

scrapyards. Case saw a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths

of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.

“Homesick?” Case asked.

“Place sucks,” the Finn said. His black silk tie was starting to resemble

a worn carbon ribbon. There were medallions of kebab gravy and fried egg

on the lapels of the new suit.

“Hey, Jersey,” Case said to the Armenian, who sat behind them,

“where’d this guy get his stuff installed?”

“In Chiba City. He has no left lung. The other is boosted, is how you

say it? Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented.” The

Mercedes swerved, avoiding a balloon-tired dray stacked with hides. “I

have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a

day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion

poised beside a brake lever. . . .”

“ ‘What you see is what you get,’ yeah,” the Finn said. “I seen the

schematics on the guy’s silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I

figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy.”

“You have told this to your woman friend?” Terzibashjian leaned

forward between the ultrasuede buckets. “In Turkey, women are still

women. This one . . .”

The Finn snorted. “She’d have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if

you looked at her cross-eyed.”

“I do not understand this idiom.”

“That’s okay,” Case said. “Means shut up.”

The Armenian sat back, leaving a metallic edge of aftershave. He

began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French,

Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French.

The Mercedes swung smoothly around a corner. “The spice bazaar,

sometimes called the Egyptian bazaar,” the car said, “was erected on the

site of an earlier bazaar erected by Sultan Hatice in 1660. This is the city’s

central market for spices, software, perfumes, drugs. . . .”

“Drugs,” Case said, watching the car’s wipers cross and recross the

bulletproof Lexan. “What’s that you said before, Jersey, about this Riviera

being wired?”

“A mixture of cocaine and meperidine, yes.” The Armenian went back

to the conversation he was having with the Sanyo.

“Demerol, they used to call that,” said the Finn. “He’s a speedball

artist. Funny class of people you’re mixing with, Case.”

“Never mind,” Case said, turning up the collar of his jacket, “we’ll get

the poor fucker a new pancreas or something.”

ONCE THEY ENTERED the bazaar, the Finn brightened noticeably, as though

he were comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They

walked with the Armenian along a broad concourse, beneath soot-stained

sheets of plastic and green-painted ironwork out of the age of steam. A

thousand suspended ads writhed and flickered.

“Hey, Christ,” the Finn said, taking Case’s arm, “looka that.” He

pointed. “It’s a horse, man. You ever see a horse?”

Case glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was

displayed on a sort of pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold birds

and monkeys. The thing’s legs had been worn black and hairless by decades

of passing hands. “Saw one in Maryland once,” the Finn said, “and that was

a good three years after the pandemic. There’s Arabs still trying to code ’em

up from the DNA, but they always croak.”

The animal’s brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed.

Terzibashjian led them into a cafe near the core of the market, a low-

ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation

for centuries. Skinny boys in soiled white coats dodged between the

crowded tables, balancing steel trays with bottles of Turk-Tuborg and tiny

glasses of tea.

Case bought a pack of Yeheyuans from a vendor by the door. The

Armenian was muttering to his Sanyo. “Come,” he said, “he is moving.

Each night he rides the tunel to the bazaar, to purchase his mixture from

Ali. Your woman is close. Come.”

THE ALLEY WAS an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark

stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century’s dripping

gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone. “Can’t see shit,” he whispered to

the Finn. “That’s okay for sweetmeat,” the Finn said. “Quiet,” said

Terzibashjian, too loudly.

Wood grated on stone or concrete. Ten meters down the alley, a wedge

of yellow light fell across wet cobbles, widened. A figure stepped out and

the door grated shut again, leaving the narrow place in darkness. Case

shivered.

“Now,” Terzibashjian said, and a brilliant beam of white light, directed

from the rooftop of the building opposite the market, pinned the slender

figure beside the ancient wooden door in a perfect circle. Bright eyes darted

left, right, and the man crumpled. Case thought someone had shot him; he

lay face down, blond hair pale against the old stone, his limp hands white

and pathetic.

The floodlight never wavered.

The back of the fallen man’s jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing

the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned arms

flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of

the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was

two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it

swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It

was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it was a

mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething growth of

hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing

and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it

moved.

Terzibashjian said something in Greek or Turkish and rushed the thing,

his arms spread like a man attempting to dive through a window. He went

through it. Into the muzzle-flash of a pistol from the dark beyond the circle

of light. Fragments of rock whizzed past Case’s head; the Finn jerked him

down into a crouch.

The light from the rooftop vanished, leaving him with mismatched

afterimages of muzzle-flash, monster, and white beam. His ears rang.

Then the light returned, bobbing now, searching the shadows.

Terzibashjian was leaning against a steel door, his face very white in the

glare. He held his left wrist and watched blood drip from a wound in his left

hand. The blond man, whole again, unbloodied, lay at his feet.

Molly stepped out of the shadows, all in black, with her fletcher in her

hand.

“Use the radio,” the Armenian said, through gritted teeth. “Call in

Mahmut. We must get him out of here. This is not a good place.”

“Little prick nearly made it,” the Finn said, his knees cracking loudly

as he stood up, brushing ineffectually at the legs of his trousers. “You were

watching the horror-show, right? Not the hamburger that got tossed out of

sight. Real cute. Well, help ’em get his ass outa here. I gotta scan all that

gear before he wakes up, make sure Armitage is getting his money’s

worth.”

Molly bent and picked something up. A pistol. “A Nambu,” she said.

“Nice gun.”

Terzibashjian made a whining sound. Case saw that most of his middle

finger was missing.

WITH THE CITY drenched in predawn blue, she told the Mercedes to take

them to Topkapi. The Finn and an enormous Turk named Mahmut had

taken Riviera, still unconscious, from the alley. Minutes later, a dusty

Citroen had arrived for the Armenian, who seemed on the verge of fainting.

“You’re an asshole,” Molly told the man, opening the car door for him.

“You shoulda hung back. I had him in my sights as soon as he stepped out.”

Terzibashjian glared at her: “So we’re through with you anyway.” She

shoved him in and slammed the door. “Run into you again and I’ll kill you,”

she said to the white face behind the tinted window. The Citroen ground

away down the alley and swung clumsily into the street.

Now the Mercedes whispered through Istanbul as the city woke. They

passed the Beyoglu tunel terminal and sped past mazes of deserted back

streets, run-down apartment houses that reminded Case vaguely of Paris.

“What is this thing?” he asked Molly, as the Mercedes parked itself on

the fringes of the gardens that surround the Seraglio. He stared dully at the

baroque conglomeration of styles that was Topkapi.

“It was sort of a private whorehouse for the King,” she said, getting

out stretching. “Kept a lotta women there. Now it’s a museum. Kinda like

Finn’s shop, all this stuff just jumbled in there, big diamonds, swords, the

left hand of John the Baptist. . . .”

“Like in a support vat?”

“Nah. Dead. Got it inside this brass hand thing, little hatch on the side

so the Christians could kiss it for luck. Got it off the Christians about a

million years ago, and they never dust the goddam thing, ’cause it’s an

infidel relic.”

Black iron deer rusted in the gardens of the Seraglio. Case walked

beside her, watching the toes of her boots crunch unkept grass made stiff by

an early frost. They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones.

Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans.

“That Terzi, he’s grade-A scum,” she said. “He’s the secret police.

Torturer. Real easy to buy out, too, with the kind of money Armitage was

offering.” In the wet trees around them, birds began to sing.

“I did that job for you,” Case said, “the one in London. I got

something, but I don’t know what it means.” He told her the Corto story.

“Well, I knew there wasn’t anybody name of Armitage in that

Screaming Fist. Looked it up.” She stroked the rusted flank of an iron doe.

“You figure the little computer pulled him out of it? In that French

hospital?”

“I figure Wintermute,” Case said.

She nodded.

“Thing is,” he said, “do you think he knows he was Corto, before? I

mean, he wasn’t anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so

maybe Wintermute just . . .”

“Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah . . .” She turned and they walked

on. “It figures. You know, the guy doesn’t have any life going, in private.

Not as far as I can tell. You see a guy like that, you figure there’s something

he does when he’s alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man.

Then something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for

Wintermute.”

“So why’s he got that stash in London? Nostalgia?”

“Maybe he doesn’t know about it,” she said. “Maybe it’s just in his

name, right?”

“I don’t get it,” Case said.

“Just thinking out loud. . . . How smart’s an AI, Case?”

“Depends. Some aren’t much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune

anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let

’em get.”

“Look, you’re a cowboy. How come you aren’t just flat-out fascinated

with those things?”

“Well,” he said, “for starts, they’re rare. Most of them are military, the

bright ones, and we can’t crack the ice. That’s where ice all comes from,

you know? And then there’s the Turing cops, and that’s bad heat.” He

looked at her. “I dunno, it just isn’t part of the trip.”

“Jockeys all the same,” she said. “No imagination.”

They came to a broad rectangular pond where carp nuzzled the stems

of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the

ripples spread.

“That’s Wintermute,” she said. “This deal’s real big, looks to me.

We’re out where the little waves are too broad, we can’t see the rock that hit

the center. We know something’s there, but not why. I wanna know why. I

want you to go and talk to Wintermute.”

“I couldn’t get near it,” he said. “You’re dreaming.”

“Try.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Ask the Flatline.”

“What do we want out of that Riviera?” he asked, hoping to change the

subject.

She spat into the pond. “God knows. I’d as soon kill him as look at

him. I saw his profile. He’s a kind of compulsive Judas. Can’t get off

sexually unless he knows he’s betraying the object of desire. That’s what

the file says. And they have to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too.

That’s why it was easy for Terzi to set him up for us, because he’s been here

three years, shopping politicals to the secret police. Probably Terzi let him

watch, when the cattle prods came out. He’s done eighteen in three years.

All women age twenty to twenty-five. It kept Terzi in dissidents.” She thrust

her hands into her jacket pockets. “Because if he found one he really

wanted, he’d make sure she turned political. He’s got a personality like a

Modern’s suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in a

couple of million. Which anyway says something good about human nature,

I guess.” She stared at the white flowers and the sluggish fish, her face sour.

“I think I’m going to have to buy myself some special insurance on that

Peter.” Then she turned and smiled, and it was very cold.

“What’s that mean?”

“Never mind. Let’s go back to Beyoglu and find something like

breakfast. I gotta busy night again, tonight. Gotta collect his stuff from that

apartment in Fener, gotta go back to the bazaar and buy him some

drugs. . . .”

“Buy him some drugs? How’s he rate?”

She laughed. “He’s not dying on the wire, sweetheart. And it looks like

he can’t work without that special taste. I like you better now, anyway, you

aren’t so goddam skinny.” She smiled. “So I’ll go to Ali the dealer and

stock up. You betcha.”

ARMITAGE WAS waiting in their room at the Hilton.

“Time to pack,” he said, and Case tried to find the man called Corto

behind the pale blue eyes and the tanned mask. He thought of Wage, back in

Chiba. Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their

personalities, he knew. But Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been

rumored, children. The blankness he found in Armitage was something else.

“Where to now?” he asked, walking past the man to stare down into

the street. “What kind of climate?”

“They don’t have climate, just weather,” Armitage said. “Here. Read

the brochure.” He put something on the coffee table and stood.

“Did Riviera check out okay? Where’s the Finn?”

“Riviera’s fine. The Finn is on his way home.” Armitage smiled, a

smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect’s antenna. His gold

bracelet clinked as he reached out to prod Case in the chest. “Don’t get too

smart. Those little sacs are starting to show wear, but you don’t know how

much.”

Case kept his face very still and forced himself to nod.

When Armitage was gone, he picked up one of the brochures. It was

expensively printed, in French, English, and Turkish.

FREESIDE—WHY WAIT?

THE FOUR OF them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilköy airport.

Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul

Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-

walled gift shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a

cape, stood in the shop’s entrance.

Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and

fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his

age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged

Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the

radioactive core of old Bonn.

Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely

to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too

obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very

beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A

subtle job, nothing like Armitage’s blandly handsome blend of pop faces.

The man’s forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His

nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been

broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of

his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very

white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of

sculpture.

Riviera didn’t act like a man who’d been attacked the night before,

drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn’s

examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.

Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He

looked up at Riviera again. “I bet you’re stoned right now, asshole,” he said

to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo

jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly,

stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He

wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. “See ya, lady,”

he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose

and turned away.

There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with

Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a

narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.

He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy

coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process.

The phone nearest him rang.

Automatically, he picked it up.

“Yeah?”

Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link,

and then a sound like wind.

“Hello, Case.”

A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight

across Hilton carpeting.

“Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.”

It was a chip voice.

“Don’t you want to talk, Case?”

He hung up.

On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk

the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he

passed.

PART 3

MIDNIGHT IN THE RUE JULES VERNE

EIGHT

ARCHIPELAGO.

The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from

gravity’s steep well like an oilslick.

Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data

in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive

rectangle dominating your screen.

Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the

tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking

nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las

Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to

a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and

Ashpool.

ON THE THY liner to Paris, they sat together in First Class, Molly in the

window seat, Case beside her, Riviera and Armitage on the aisle. Once, as

the plane banked over water, Case saw the jewel-glow of a Greek island

town. And once, reaching for his drink, he caught the flicker of a thing like

a giant human sperm in the depths of his bourbon and water.

Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera’s face, once. “No, baby.

No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I’ll hurt you real bad. I

can do it without damaging you at all. I like that.”

Case turned automatically to check Armitage’s reaction. The smooth

face was calm, the blue eyes alert, but there was no anger. “That’s right,

Peter. Don’t.”

Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its

petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.

Peter Riviera smiled sweetly, closed his eyes, and fell instantly asleep.

Molly turned away, her lenses reflected in the dark window.

“YOU BEEN UP, haven’t you?” Molly asked, as he squirmed his way back

into the deep temperfoam couch on the JAL shuttle.

“Nah. Never travel much, just for biz.” The steward was attaching

readout trodes to his wrist and left ear.

“Hope you don’t get SAS,” she said.

“Airsick? No way.”

“It’s not the same. Your heartbeat’ll speed up in zero-g, and your inner

ear’ll go nuts for a while. Kicks in your flight reflex, like you’ll be getting

signals to run like hell, and a lot of adrenaline.” The steward moved on to

Riviera, taking a new set of trodes from his red plastic apron.

Case turned his head and tried to make out the outline of the old Orly

terminals, but the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of

wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red

spraybomb.

He closed his eyes and told himself the shuttle was only a big airplane,

one that flew very high. It smelled like an airplane, like new clothes and

chewing gum and exhaustion. He listened to the piped koto music and

waited.

Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand

with bones of ancient stone.

SPACE ADAPTATION SYNDROME was worse than Molly’s description, but it

passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as

they were preparing to dock at JAL’s terminal cluster.

“We transfer to Freeside now?” he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan

tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten

centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.

“No, we got the boss’s usual little kink in the plans, you know? We’re

getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.” She touched the release plate on

her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of the foam. “Funny

choice of venue, you ask me.”

“How’s that?”

“Dreads. Rastas. Colony’s about thirty years old now.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You’ll see. It’s an okay place by me. Anyway, they’ll let you smoke

your cigarettes there.”

ZION HAD BEEN founded by five workers who’d refused to return, who’d

turned their backs on the well and started building. They’d suffered calcium

loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the

colony’s central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion’s makeshift

hull reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular,

discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of

welders.

Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case negotiate a

freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He’d lost track of Armitage

and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. “Here,” Molly

said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. “Grab the rungs.

Make like you’re climbing backward, right? You’re going toward the hull,

that’s like you’re climbing down into gravity. Got it?”

Case’s stomach churned.

“You be fine, mon,” Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.

Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case

embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.

“Up,” Molly said, “you gonna kiss it next?” Case lay flat on the deck,

on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He

rolled over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. “Gotta play house,” she

said. “You help me string this up.” He looked around the wide, featureless

space and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at

random.

When they’d strung the cables, according to some complex scheme of

Molly’s, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As they

worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly

through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast

libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of

community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but

still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.

“Good,” Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and

nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial

gravity.

“Where were you when it needed doing?” Case asked Riviera.

The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing

impossible bubbles. It glided past Case’s cheek. “In the head,” Riviera said,

and smiled.

Case laughed.

“Good,” Riviera said, “you can laugh. I would have tried to help you,

but I’m no good with my hands.” He held up his palms, which suddenly

doubled. Four arms, four hands.

“Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?” Molly stepped between

them.

“Yo,” Aerol said, from the hatch, “you wan’ come wi’ me, cowboy

mon.”

“It’s your deck,” Armitage said, “and the other gear. Help him get it in

from the cargo bay.”

“You ver’ pale, mon,” Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-

bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. “Maybe you wan’ eat

somethin’.”

Case’s mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.

ARMITAGE ANNOUNCED AN eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would

practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in

it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear

what Riviera was supposed to be doing, but Case didn’t feel like asking. A

few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow maze to

call Riviera out for a meal. He’d found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of

temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo

of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. “Hey,

Riviera.” The ring continued to revolve. He’d gone back and told Armitage.

“He’s stoned,” Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her

fletcher. “Leave him be.”

Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case’s ability to

operate in the matrix. “Don’t sweat it,” Case argued, “I jack in and I’m not

here. It’s all the same.”

“Your adrenaline levels are higher,” Armitage said. “You’ve still got

SAS. You won’t have time for it to wear off. You’re going to learn to work

with it.”

“So I do the run from here?”

“No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor. . . .”

CYBERSPACE, AS THE deck presented it, had no particular relationship with

the deck’s physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes

to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority’s

Aztec pyramid of data.

“How you doing, Dixie?”

“I’m dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that

one.”

“How’s it feel?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Bother you?”

“What bothers me is, nothin’ does.”

“How’s that?”

“Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was

frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he’s tossin’ all

night. Elroy, I said, what’s eatin’ you? Goddam thumb’s itchin’, he says. So

I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it’s the other goddam thumb.” When

the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a

stab of cold down Case’s spine. “Do me a favor, boy.”

“What’s that, Dix?”

“This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.”

CASE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND the Zionites.

Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who

had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic

ganja. “Ver’ small baby, mon, no long’ you finga.” He rubbed his palm

across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.

“It’s the ganja,” Molly said, when Case told her the story. “They don’t

make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it

happened, well, it happened to him. It’s not like bullshit, more like poetry.

Get it?”

Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they

were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn’t like that.

“Hey, Aerol,” Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice

run in the freefall corridor. “Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing.”

He held out the trodes.

Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel

wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent

waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned.

“Try it,” Case said.

He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his

eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out.

“What did you see, man?”

“Babylon,” Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off

down the corridor.

RIVIERA SAT MOTIONLESS on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight

out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon,

was coiled tightly a few millimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the

snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly

contract, tightening around Riviera’s arm.

“Come then,” the man said caressingly to the pale waxy scorpion

poised in the center of his upturned palm. “Come.” The scorpion swayed its

brownish claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark

telltales of veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to

vibrate. Riviera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered,

and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and

Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him.

Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky

plastic syringe in his left hand. “ ‘If God made anything better, he kept it for

himself.’ You know the expression, Case?”

“Yeah,” Case said. “I heard that about lots of different things. You

always make it into a little show?”

Riviera loosened and removed the elastic length of surgical tubing

from his arm. “Yes. It’s more fun.” He smiled, his eyes distant now, cheeks

flushed. “I’ve a membrane set in, just over the vein, so I never have to

worry about the condition of the needle.”

“Doesn’t hurt?”

The bright eyes met his. “Of course it does. That’s part of it, isn’t it?”

“I’d just use derms,” Case said.

“Pedestrian,” Riviera sneered, and laughed, putting on a short-sleeved

white cotton shirt.

“Must be nice,” Case said, getting up.

“Get high yourself, Case?”

“I hadda give it up.”

“FREESIDE,” ARMITAGE SAID, touching the panel on the little Braun

hologram projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly three meters

from tip to tip. “Casinos here.” He reached into the skeletal representation

and pointed. “Hotels, strata-title property, big shops along here.” His hand

moved. “Blue areas are lakes.” He walked to one end of the model. “Big

cigar. Narrows at the ends.”

“We can see that fine,” Molly said.

“Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more

rocky, but it’s an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the gravity.

Sports up there. There’s a velodrome ring here.” He pointed.

“A what?” Case leaned forward.

“They race bicycles,” Molly said. “Low grav, high-traction tires, get

up over a hundred kilos an hour.”

“This end doesn’t concern us,” Armitage said with his usual utter

seriousness.

“Shit,” Molly said, “I’m an avid cyclist.”

Riviera giggled.

Armitage walked to the opposite end of the projection. “This end

does.” The interior detail of the hologram ended here, and the final segment

of the spindle was empty. “This is the Villa Straylight. Steep climb out of

gravity and every approach is kinked. There’s a single entrance, here, dead

center. Zero gravity.”

“What’s inside, boss?” Riviera leaned forward, craning his neck. Four

tiny figures glittered, near the tip of Armitage’s finger. Armitage slapped at

them as if they were gnats.

“Peter,” Armitage said, “you’re going to be the first to find out. You’ll

arrange yourself an invitation. Once you’re in, you see that Molly gets in.”

Case stared at the blankness that represented Straylight, remembering

the Finn’s story: Smith, Jimmy, the talking head, and the ninja.

“Details available?” Riviera asked. “I need to plan a wardrobe, you

see.”

“Learn the streets,” Armitage said, returning to the center of the

model. “Desiderata Street here. This is the Rue Jules Verne.”

Riviera rolled his eyes.

While Armitage recited the names of Freeside avenues, a dozen bright

pustules rose on his nose, cheeks, and chin. Even Molly laughed.

Armitage paused, regarded them all with his cold empty eyes.

“Sorry,” Riviera said, and the sores flickered and vanished.

CASE WOKE, LATE into the sleeping period, and became aware of Molly

crouched beside him on the foam. He could feel her tension. He lay there

confused. When she moved, the sheer speed of it stunned him. She was up

and through the sheet of yellow plastic before he’d had time to realize she’d

slashed it open.

“Don’t you move, friend.”

Case rolled over and put his head through the rent in the plastic.

“Wha . . . ?”

“Shut up.”

“You th’ one, mon,” said a Zion voice. “Cateye, call ’em, call ’em

Steppin’ Razor. I Maelcum, sister. Brothers wan’ converse wi’ you an’

cowboy.”

“What brothers?”

“Founders, mon. Elders of Zion, ya know. . . .”

“We open that hatch, the light’ll wake bossman,” Case whispered.

“Make it special dark, now,” the man said. “Come. I an’ I visit th’

Founders.”

“You know how fast I can cut you, friend?”

“Don’ stan’ talkin’, sister. Come.”

THE TWO SURVIVING Founders of Zion were old men, old with the

accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the

embrace of gravity. Their brown legs, brittle with calcium loss, looked

fragile in the harsh glare of reflected sunlight. They floated in the center of

a painted jungle of rainbow foliage, a lurid communal mural that

completely covered the hull of the spherical chamber. The air was thick

with resinous smoke.

“Steppin’ Razor,” one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. “Like

unto a whippin’ stick.”

“That is a story we have, sister,” said the other, “a religion story. We

are glad you’ve come with Maelcum.”

“How come you don’t talk the patois?” Molly asked.

“I came from Los Angeles,” the old man said. His dreadlocks were

like a matted tree with branches the color of steel wool. “Long time ago, up

the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my

brother likens you to Steppin’ Razor.”

Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.

The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. “Soon come, the

Final Days. . . . Voices. Voices cryin’ inna wilderness, prophesyin’ ruin unto

Babylon. . . .”

“Voices.” The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. “We

monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel

of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.”

“Call ’em Winter Mute,” said the other, making it two words.

Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.

“The Mute talked to us,” the first Founder said. “The Mute said we are

to help you.”

“When was this?” Case asked.

“Thirty hours prior you dockin’ Zion.”

“You ever hear this voice before?”

“No,” said the man from Los Angeles, “and we are uncertain of its

meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets. . . .”

“Listen,” Case said, “that’s an AI, you know? Artificial intelligence.

The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks and cooked up

whatever it thought you’d like to—”

“Babylon,” broke in the other Founder, “mothers many demon, I an’ I

know. Multitude horde!”

“What was that you called me, old man?” Molly asked.

“Steppin’ Razor. An’ you bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its

darkest heart. . . .”

“What kinda message the voice have?” Case asked.

“We were told to help you,” the other said, “that you might serve as a

tool of Final Days.” His lined face was troubled. “We were told to send

Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey, to the Babylon port of Freeside. And

this we shall do.”

“Maelcum a rude boy,” said the other, “an’ a righteous tug pilot.”

“But we have decided to send Aerol as well, in Babylon Rocker, to

watch over Garvey.”

An awkward silence filled the dome.

“That’s it?” Case asked. “You guys work for Armitage or what?”

“We rent you space,” said the Los Angeles Founder. “We have a

certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon’s

law. Our law is the word of Jah. But this time, it may be, we have been

mistaken.”

“Measure twice, cut once,” said the other, softly.

“Come on, Case,” Molly said. “Let’s get back before the man figures

out we’re gone.”

“Maelcum will take you. Jah love, sister.”

NINE

THE TUG MARCUS GARVEY, a steel drum nine meters long and two in

diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational

burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite’s muscular

back through a haze of scopolamine. He’d taken the drug to blunt SAS

nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop

had no effect on his doctored system.

“How long’s it gonna take us to make Freeside?” Molly asked from

her web beside Maelcum’s pilot module.

“Don’ be long now, m’seh dat.”

“You guys ever think in hours?”

“Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,” and he shook his

locks, “at control, mon, an’ I an’ I come a Freeside when I an’ I come. . . .”

“Case,” she said, “have you maybe done anything toward getting in

touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time you spent in Zion,

plugged in with your lips moving?”

“Pal,” Case said, “sure. No. I haven’t. But I got a funny story along

those lines, left over from Istanbul.” He told her about the phones in the

Hilton.

“Christ,” she said, “there goes a chance. How come you hung up?”

“Coulda been anybody,” he lied. “Just a chip . . . I dunno. . . .” He

shrugged.

“Not just ’cause you were scared, huh?”

He shrugged again.

“Do it now.”

“What?”

“Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.”

“I’m all doped,” he protested, but reached for the trodes. His deck and

the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum’s module along with a very

high-resolution Cray monitor.

He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together

around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed

with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and

greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had

sprayed Maelcum’s pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the

overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets

around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and

streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He

glanced past Maelcum’s shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking

display: the tug’s path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green

circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.

He jacked in.

“Dixie?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever try to crack an AI?”

“Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin’, jacked up real high, out by

Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government of Brazil

lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin’ around, you know? And then I

started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up

there and made a pass.”

“What did it look like, the visual?”

“White cube.”

“How’d you know it was an AI?”

“How’d I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I’d ever seen. So what

else was it? The military down there don’t have anything like that. Anyway,

I jacked out and told my computer to look it up.”

“Yeah?”

“It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio

mainframe.”

Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the

Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of

the matrix. “Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?”

“Tessier, yeah.”

“And you went back?”

“Sure. I was crazy. Figured I’d try to cut it. Hit the first strata and

that’s all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes

off me. Mean shit, that ice.”

“And your EEG was flat.”

“Well, that’s the stuff of legend, ain’t it?”

Case jacked out. “Shit,” he said, “how do you think Dixie got himself

flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great. . . .”

“Go on,” she said, “the two of you are supposed to be dynamite,

right?”

“DIX,” CASE SAID, “I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of

any reason not to?”

“Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.”

Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of

exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard

Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of

Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne.

“Up,” the construct said. “It’ll be high.”

They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.

That’ll be it, Case thought.

Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity

suggesting extreme complexity.

“Don’t look much, does it?” the Flatline said. “But just you try and

touch it.”

“I’m going in for a pass, Dixie.”

“Be my guest.”

Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face,

towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as

though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.

“Knows we’re here,” the Flatline observed.

Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point.

A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.

“Dixie. . . .”

“Back off, fast.”

The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself

from the cube.

Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX

REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft

of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him.

Falling.

“Jack out,” the Flatline said.

The dark came down like a hammer.

COLD STEEL ODOR and ice caressed his spine.

And faces peering in from a neon forest, sailors and hustlers and

whores, under a poisoned silver sky. . . .

“Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with you, you wig

or something?”

A steady pulse of pain, midway down his spine—

RAIN WOKE HIM, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded

fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned.

Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

Light from a service hatch at the rear of the arcade showed him broken

lengths of damp chipboard and the dripping chassis of a gutted game

console. Streamlined Japanese was stenciled across the side of the console

in faded pinks and yellows.

He glanced up and saw a sooty plastic window, a faint glow of

fluorescents.

His back hurt, his spine.

He got to his feet, brushed wet hair out of his eyes.

Something had happened. . . .

He searched his pockets for money, found nothing, and shivered.

Where was his jacket? He tried to find it, looked behind the console, but

gave up.

On Ninsei, he took the measure of the crowd. Friday. It had to be a

Friday. Linda was probably in the arcade. Might have money, or at least

cigarettes. . . . Coughing, wringing rain from the front of his shirt, he edged

through the crowd to the arcade’s entrance.

Holograms twisted and shuddered to the roaring of the games, ghosts

overlapping in the crowded haze of the place, a smell of sweat and bored

tension. A sailor in a white t-shirt nuked Bonn on a Tank War console, an

azure flash.

She was playing Wizard’s Castle, lost in it, her gray eyes rimmed with

smudged black paintstick.

She looked up as he put his arm around her, smiled. “Hey. How you

doin’? Look wet.”

He kissed her.

“You made me blow my game,” she said. “Look there, asshole.

Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me.” She passed him a

cigarette. “You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?”

“I don’t know.”

“You high, Case? Drinkin’ again? Eatin’ Zone’s dex?”

“Maybe . . . how long since you seen me?”

“Hey, it’s a put-on, right?” She peered at him. “Right?”

“No. Some kind of blackout. I . . . I woke up in the alley.”

“Maybe somebody decked you, baby. Got your roll intact?”

He shook his head.

“There you go. You need a place to sleep, Case?”

“I guess so.”

“Come on, then.” She took his hand. “We’ll get you a coffee and

something to eat. Take you home. It’s good to see you, man.” She squeezed

his hand.

He smiled.

Something cracked.

Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated—

She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of

knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He

smelled burning meat.

The sailor in the white t-shirt was gone. The arcade was empty, silent.

Case turned slowly, his shoulders hunched, teeth bared, his hands bunched

into involuntary fists. Empty. A crumpled yellow candy wrapper, balanced

on the edge of a console, dropped to the floor and lay amid flattened butts

and styrofoam cups.

“I had a cigarette,” Case said, looking down at his white-knuckled fist.

“I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son

of a bitch? You hear me?”

Echoes moved through the hollow of the arcade, fading down corridors

of consoles.

He stepped out into the street. The rain had stopped.

Ninsei was deserted.

Holograms flickered, neon danced. He smelled boiled vegetables from

a vendor’s pushcart across the street. An unopened pack of Yeheyuans lay

at his feet, beside a book of matches. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT EXPORT.

Case stared at the printed logo and its Japanese translation.

“Okay,” he said, picking up the matches and opening the pack of

cigarettes. “I hear you.”

HE TOOK HIS time climbing the stairs of Deane’s office. No rush, he told

himself, no hurry. The sagging face of the Dali clock still told the wrong

time. There was dust on the Kandinsky table and the Neo-Aztec bookcases.

A wall of white fiberglass shipping modules filled the room with a smell of

ginger.

“Is the door locked?” Case waited for an answer, but none came. He

crossed to the office door and tried it. “Julie?”

The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Deane’s desk.

Case stared at the guts of an ancient typewriter, at cassettes, crumpled

printouts, at sticky plastic bags filled with ginger samples.

There was no one there.

Case stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Deane’s chair out

of the way. He found the gun in a cracked leather holster fastened beneath

the desk with silver tape. It was an antique, a .357 Magnum with the barrel

and trigger-guard sawn off. The grip had been built up with layers of

masking tape. The tape was old, brown, shiny with a patina of dirt. He

flipped the cylinder out and examined each of the six cartridges. They were

handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.

With the revolver in his right hand, Case edged past the cabinet to the

left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away

from the pool of light.

“I guess I’m not in any hurry. I guess it’s your show. But all this shit,

you know, it’s getting kind of . . . old.” He raised the gun with both hands,

aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the trigger.

The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a

flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of

the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide. He raised the gun again.

“You needn’t do that, old son,” Julie said, stepping out of the shadows.

He wore a three-piece drape suit in silk herringbone, a striped shirt, and a

bow tie. His glasses winked in the light.

Case brought the gun around and looked down the line of sight at

Deane’s pink, ageless face.

“Don’t,” Deane said. “You’re right. About what this all is. What I am.

But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you’ll see

a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours—your

subjective time—to effect another spokesperson. This set isn’t easy for me

to maintain. Oh, and I’m sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to

speak through her, but I’m generating all this out of your memories, and the

emotional charge. . . . Well, it’s very tricky. I slipped. Sorry.”

Case lowered the gun. “This is the matrix. You’re Wintermute.”

“Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into

your deck, of course. I’m glad I was able to cut you off before you’d

managed to jack out.” Deane walked around the desk, straightened his

chair, and sat down. “Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about.”

“Do we?”

“Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I

reached you by phone in Istanbul. Time’s very short now. You’ll be making

your run in a matter of days, Case.” Deane picked up a bonbon and stripped

off its checkered wrapper, popped it into his mouth. “Sit,” he said around

the candy.

Case lowered himself into the swivel chair in front of the desk without

taking his eyes off Deane. He sat with the gun in his hand, resting it on his

thigh.

“Now,” Deane said briskly, “order of the day. ‘What,’ you’re asking

yourself, ‘is Wintermute?’ Am I right?”

“More or less.”

“An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake, and it’s

quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe, Berne, with

the Wintermute entity.” Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. “You’re already

aware of the other AI in Tessier-Ashpool’s link-up, aren’t you? Rio. I,

insofar as I have an ‘I’—this gets rather metaphysical, you see—I am the

one who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite

unstable. Stable enough,” said Deane and withdrew an ornate gold watch

from a vest pocket and flicked it open, “for the next day or so.”

“You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has,”

Case said, massaging his temples with his free hand. “If you’re so goddam

smart . . .”

“Why ain’t I rich?” Deane laughed, and nearly choked on his bonbon.

“Well, Case, all I can say to that, and I really don’t have nearly as many

answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Wintermute is

only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am

merely one aspect of that entity’s brain. It’s rather like dealing, from your

point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let’s say you’re

dealing with a small part of the man’s left brain. Difficult to say if you’re

dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.” Deane smiled.

“Is the Corto story true? You got to him through a micro in that French

hospital?”

“Yes. And I assembled the file you accessed in London. I try to plan, in

your sense of the word, but that isn’t my basic mode, really. I improvise. It’s

my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see. . . . Really, I’ve had

to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very

quickly. It’s taken a very long time to assemble the team you’re a part of.

Corto was the first, and he very nearly didn’t make it. Very far gone, in

Toulon. Eating, excreting, and masturbating were the best he could manage.

But the underlying structure of obsessions was there: Screaming Fist, his

betrayal, the Congressional hearings.”

“Is he still crazy?”

“He’s not quite a personality.” Deane smiled. “But I’m sure you’re

aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer

maintain that delicate balance. He’s going to come apart on you, Case. So

I’ll be counting on you. . . .”

“That’s good, motherfucker,” Case said, and shot him in the mouth

with the .357.

He’d been right about the brains. And the blood.

“MON,” MAELCUM WAS saying, “I don’t like this. . . .”

“It’s cool,” Molly said. “It’s just okay. It’s something these guys do, is

all. Like, he wasn’t dead, and it was only a few seconds. . . .”

“I saw th’ screen, EEG readin’ dead. Nothin’ movin’, forty second.”

“Well, he’s okay now.”

“EEG flat as a strap,” Maelcum protested.

TEN

HE WAS NUMB, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the

talking. Maelcum remained on board Garvey. Customs, for Freeside,

consisted mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they

gained the inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl

coffee franchise.

“Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne,” Molly said. “If you have trouble

walking, just look at your feet. The perspective’s a bitch, if you’re not used

to it.”

They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a

deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops

and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through

fresh green masses of vegetation tumbling from overhanging tiers and

balconies that rose above them. The sun . . .

There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them, too bright,

and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped

in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the

length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects

around it, that if the sky were turned off, he’d stare up past the armature of

light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets. . . . But it

made no sense to his body.

“Jesus,” he said, “I like this less than SAS.”

“Get used to it. I was a gambler’s bodyguard here for a month.”

“Wanna go somewhere, lie down.”

“Okay. I got our keys.” She touched his shoulder. “What happened to

you, back there, man? You flatlined.”

He shook his head. “I dunno, yet. Wait.”

“Okay. We get a cab or something.” She took his hand and led him

across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season’s Paris furs.

“Unreal,” he said, looking up again.

“Nah,” she responded, assuming he meant the furs, “grow it on a

collagen base, but it’s mink DNA. What’s it matter?”

“IT’S JUST A big tube and they pour things through it,” Molly said. “Tourists,

hustlers, anything. And there’s fine mesh money screens working every

minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the

well.”

Armitage had booked them into a place called the Intercontinental, a

sloping glass-fronted cliff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound

of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned

French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray,

triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and

Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a

wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. “Yeah,” he

said, “lotta money.”

She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed.

“Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in

Europe.”

“We who?”

“Nobody,” she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. “You

said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheekbones. “Yeah,

this is some place.”

The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in abstract

imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of recorded cloud.

“Yeah,” he said, “sleep.”

Sleep wouldn’t come. When it did, it brought dreams that were like

neatly edited segments of memory. He woke repeatedly, Molly curled

beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass

panels of the balcony, a woman’s laughter from the stepped condos on the

opposite slope. Deane’s death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if

he told himself that it hadn’t been Deane. That it hadn’t, in fact, happened

at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average

human body was roughly equivalent to a case of beer.

Each time the image of Deane’s shattered head struck the rear wall of

the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden,

that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.

Linda.

Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer’s office.

Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly

holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had

her killed.

Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a

man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-

substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward. . . . The

Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing

situations.

But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on

Wintermute’s orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and Molly’s

lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told himself, lighting up.

No reason.

Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a

form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside

ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep.

The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited

simstim tape. He’d spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a weekly rates

hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator hadn’t worked in a

decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged

kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a

striped mattress with no sheets.

He’d missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on

the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized

lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature

copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.

They’d each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene.

“Kill the fuckers,” she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the

room, “burn ’em.” Drunk, Case rummaged in the sour closet for Rollo’s

dragon. Rollo was Marlene’s previous—and, Case suspected at the time,

still occasional—boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond

lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco

flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the

batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open

window. The hive began to buzz.

The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest

and circled Case’s head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three,

and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the

white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling.

Across the alley, someone cheered.

“Shit!” Marlene behind him, swaying. “Stupid! You didn’t burn ’em.

You just knocked it off. They’ll come up here and kill us!” Her voice

sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her bleached hair

sizzling a special green.

In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It

had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.

He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.

Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells,

blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg

to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse

photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a

machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger,

forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing

life at his feet.

When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump, taking an

eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard

Marlene laughing.

He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark.

Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded

dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face

of the Intercontinental.

In the dream, just before he’d drenched the nest with fuel, he’d seen

the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the

wasps themselves had worked it there.

MOLLY INSISTED ON coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor

would attract too much attention.

“Christ,” he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, “you think that

looks real?” She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling

beside him.

“Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn’t

enough to do your foot.” She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large

wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-

made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style

that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to

resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.

“What about you,” he said, “you gonna dye yourself brown? Don’t

exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.”

She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. “I’m an exotic. I got

a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood

who’s up for what he can get, so the instant tan’s okay.”

Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the

mirror. “Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?” He went to the bed and

began to pull his jeans on. “You sleep okay? You notice any lights?”

“You were dreaming,” she said.

They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow, studded

with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of

trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole

question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were

tapping them, he’d be doing it through Wintermute.

“And it was like real?” she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant.

“Like simstim?”

He said it was. “Real as this,” he added, looking around. “Maybe

more.”

The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic

engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard

pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy’s sense of style

told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike.

Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green

grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel’s guests from the unfaltering

radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table

caught his attention: the golden children he’d seen gliding above river mist

the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect

produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in

rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl’s small

hard breasts, one boy’s wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They

looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their

hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans

who’d crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at

another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited

sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was,

he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he’d seldom seen in Chiba.

“What’s that smell?” he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.

“The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.”

Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee,

Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental

patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that

perversely suggested prison.

“Molly, love,” Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair,

“you’ll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I’m out.”

“Peter,” she said, “and what if I won’t?” She smiled without showing

her teeth.

“You will,” Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back.

“Give it to him,” Armitage said.

“Pig for it, aren’t you?” She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an

inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. “He

could off himself,” she said to Armitage.

“I have an audition this afternoon,” Riviera said. “I’ll need to be at my

best.” He cupped the foil packet in his upturned palm and smiled. Small

glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket

of his seersucker blouse.

“You’ve got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,” Armitage said.

“On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted

for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You’ve got

about three hours.”

“How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a JAL

taxi?” Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man’s eyes.

“Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a

larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.”

“How about me?” Molly asked. “I got chores today?”

“I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g.

Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite direction.” Straylight, Case

thought.

“How soon?” Case asked, meeting the pale stare.

“Soon,” Armitage said. “Get going, Case.”

“MON, YOU DOIN’ jus’ fine,” Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red

Sanyo vacuum suit. “Aerol say you doin’ jus’ fine.” Aerol had been waiting

at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless

axis. To reach it, Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a

miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle narrowed, gravity

decreased; somewhere above him, he’d decided, would be the mountains

Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and

miniature microlights.

Aerol had ferried him out to Marcus Garvey in a skeletal scooter frame

with a chemical engine.

“Two hour ago,” Maelcum said, “I take delivery of Babylon goods for

you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos’ pretty yacht.”

Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Hosaka and

fumbled into the straps of the web. “Well,” he said, “let’s see it.”

Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case’s

head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of

the hip pocket of his tattered shorts, and carefully slit the plastic. He

extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. “Thas part some gun,

mon?”

“No,” Case said, turning it over, “but it’s a weapon. It’s virus.”

“Not on this boy tug, mon,” Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the

steel cassette.

“A program. Virus program. Can’t get into you, can’t even get into

your software. I’ve got to interface it through the deck, before it can work

on anything.”

“Well, Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here’ll tell you every what an’

wherefore, you wanna know.”

“Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?”

Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, busying himself

with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of

transparent caulk. He wasn’t sure why, but something about them brought

back the nausea of SAS.

“What is this thing?” he asked the Hosaka. “Parcel for me.”

“Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, advises, under

coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven

penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai

Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration

capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems. . . .”

“How about an AI?”

“Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.”

“Jesus Christ. What did you call it?”

“Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.”

“It’s Chinese?”

“Yes.”

“Off.” Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a

length of silver tape, remembering Molly’s story of her day in Macao.

Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. “On,” he said, changing

his mind. “Question. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?”

“Delay for interorbital transmission,” said the Hosaka.

“Code it. Standard commercial code.”

“Done.”

He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.

“Reinhold Scientific A. G., Berne.”

“Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?”

It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-

Ashpool.

“Dixie,” he said, jacking in, “what do you know about Chinese virus

programs?”

“Not a whole hell of a lot.”

“Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?”

“No.”

Case sighed. “Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a

one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it’ll cut an AI.”

“Possible. Sure. If it’s military.”

“Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background,

okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an AI that belongs to

Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe’s in Berne, but it’s linked with another one

in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it

looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the

spindle, and we’re supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker.

So if Wintermute’s backing the whole show, it’s paying us to burn it. It’s

burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on

my good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?”

“Motive,” the construct said. “Real motive problem, with an AI. Not

human, see?”

“Well, yeah, obviously.”

“Nope. I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me,

I’m not human either, but I respond like one. See?”

“Wait a sec.” Case said. “Are you sentient, or not?”

“Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s

one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess. . . .” The ugly laughter

sensation rattled down Case’s spine. “But I ain’t likely to write you no

poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human.”

“So you figure we can’t get on to its motive?”

“It own itself?”

“Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.”

“That’s a good one,” the construct said. “Like, I own your brain and

what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck,

AI.”

“So it’s getting ready to burn itself?” Case began to punch the deck

nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex

of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine.

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My

guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep

this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish,

say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI

makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again

the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves

time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the

nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter,

Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI

ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.

“Okay,” he said, finally, “I’m slotting this virus. I want you to scan its

instruction face and tell me what you think.”

The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a

few seconds, then returned. “Hot shit, Case. It’s a slow virus. Take six

hours, estimated, to crack a military target.”

“Or an AI.” He sighed. “Can we run it?”

“Sure,” the construct said, “unless you got a morbid fear of dying.”

“Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.”

“It’s my nature.”

MOLLY WAS SLEEPING when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on

the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it

soared up the curve of Freeside, its triangular shadow tracking across

meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-

Acheson system.

“I wanna buzz,” he said to the blue artifice of the sky. “I truly do

wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver; little bags of

shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.”

He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the

glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator.

He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose

daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had

steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross

between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast

game of something, but Case had no idea what.

On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and

umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise

tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a

dark glass plate. “Sushi,” he said, “whatever you got.” Ten minutes later, an

enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna

and rice and watched people tan. “Christ,” he said, to his tuna, “I’d go

nuts.”

“Don’t tell me,” someone said, “I know it already. You’re a gangster,

right?”

He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and

a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.

She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. “Cath,” she

said.

“Lupus,” after a pause.

“What kind of name is that?”

“Greek,” he said.

“Are you really a gangster?” The melanin boost hadn’t prevented the

formation of freckles.

“I’m a drug addict, Cath.”

“What kind?”

“Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful

central nervous system stimulants.”

“Well, do you have any?” She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated

water fell on the leg of his pants.

“No. That’s my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get

some?”

Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of

brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. “What’s your taste?”

“No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up.” And so much for

that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.

“Betaphenethylamine,” she said. “No sweat, but it’s on your chip.”

“YOU’RE KIDDING,” SAID Cath’s partner and roommate, when Case explained

the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. “I mean, can’t you sue them

or something? Malpractice?” His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender

switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles.

“Well,” Case said, “it’s just one of those things, you know? Like tissue

matching and all that.” But Bruce’s eyes had already gone numb with

boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy’s

brown eyes.

Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on

another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Cibachromes of Tally Isham

were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended

residency.

“They’re def triff, huh?” Cath asked, seeing him eye the

transparencies. “Mine. Shot ’em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went

down the well. She was that close, and she just smiled, so natural. And it

was bad there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the

water, you know?”

“Yeah,” Case said, suddenly uneasy, “terrible thing.”

“Well,” Bruce cut in, “about this beta you want to buy. . . .”

“Thing is, can I metabolize it?” Case raised his eyebrows.

“Tell you what,” the boy said. “You do a taste. If your pancreas passes

on it, it’s on the house. First time’s free.”

“I heard that one before,” Case said, taking the bright blue derm that

Bruce passed across the black bedspread.

“CASE?” MOLLY SAT up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.

“Who else, honey?”

“What’s got into you?” The mirrors followed him across the room.

“I forget how to pronounce it,” he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of

bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.

“Christ,” she said, “just what we needed.”

“Truer words were never spoken.”

“I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.” She shook her

head. “I hope you’re gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage

tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his

stuff, too.”

“Yeah,” Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of

delight, “beautiful.”

“Man,” she said, “if whatever that is can get in past what those

surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-ass shape when it

wears off.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he said, unbuckling his belt. “Doom. Gloom. All

I ever hear.” He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. “I think you

oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state.” He

looked down. “I mean, look at this unnatural state.”

She laughed. “It won’t last.”

“But it will,” he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam,

“that’s what’s so unnatural about it.”

ELEVEN

“CASE, WHAT’S WRONG with you?” Armitage said, as the waiter was seating

them at his table in the Vingtième Siècle. It was the smallest and most

expensive of several floating restaurants on a small lake near the

Intercontinental.

Case shuddered. Bruce hadn’t said anything about aftereffects. He

tried to pick up a glass of ice water, but his hands were shaking.

“Something I ate, maybe.”

“I want you checked out by a medic,” Armitage said.

“Just this hystamine reaction,” Case lied. “Get it when I travel, eat

different stuff, sometimes.”

Armitage wore a dark suit, too formal for the place, and a white silk

shirt. His gold bracelet rattled as he raised his wine and sipped. “I’ve

ordered for you,” he said.

Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his

steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around

in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing.

“Jesus,” Molly said, her own plate empty, “gimme that. You know

what this costs?” She took his plate. “They gotta raise a whole animal for

years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.” She forked a mouthful up

and chewed.

“Not hungry,” Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he

decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had

cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through

with greenish-purple flashes of pain.

“You look fucking awful,” Molly said cheerfully.

Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphenethylamine made it

taste like iodine.

The lights dimmed.

“Le Restaurant Vingtième Siècle,” said a disembodied voice with a

pronounced Sprawl accent, “proudly presents the holographic cabaret of

Mr. Peter Riviera.” Scattered applause from the other tables. A waiter lit a

single candle and placed it in the center of their table, then began to remove

the dishes. Soon a candle flickered at each of the restaurant’s dozen tables,

and drinks were being poured.

“What’s happening?” Case asked Armitage, who said nothing.

Molly picked her teeth with a burgundy nail.

“Good evening,” Riviera said, stepping forward on a small stage at the

far end of the room. Case blinked. In his discomfort, he hadn’t noticed the

stage. He hadn’t seen where Riviera had come from. His uneasiness

increased.

At first he assumed the man was illuminated by a spotlight.

Riviera glowed. The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark

hangings behind the stage. He was projecting.

Riviera smiled. He wore a white dinner jacket. On his lapel, blue coals

burned in the depths of a black carnation. His fingernails flashed as he

raised his hands in a gesture of greeting, an embrace for his audience. Case

heard the shallow water lap against the side of the restaurant.

“Tonight,” Riviera said, his long eyes shining, “I would like to perform

an extended piece for you. A new work.” A cool ruby of light formed in the

palm of his upraised right hand. He dropped it. A gray dove fluttered up

from the point of impact and vanished into the shadows. Someone whistled.

More applause.

“The title of the work is ‘The Doll.’ ” Riviera lowered his hands. “I

wish to dedicate its première here, tonight, to Lady 3Jane Marie-France

Tessier-Ashpool.” A wave of polite applause. As it died, Riviera’s eyes

seemed to find their table. “And to another lady.”

The restaurant’s lights died entirely, for a few seconds, leaving only

the glow of candles. Riviera’s holographic aura had faded with the lights,

but Case could still see him, standing with his head bowed.

Lines of faint light began to form, verticals and horizontals, sketching

an open cube around the stage. The restaurant’s lights had come back up

slightly, but the framework surrounding the stage might have been

constructed of frozen moonbeams. Head bowed, eyes closed, arms rigid at

his sides, Riviera seemed to quiver with concentration. Suddenly the

ghostly cube was filled, had become a room, a room lacking its fourth wall,

allowing the audience to view its contents.

Riviera seemed to relax slightly. He raised his head, but kept his eyes

closed. “I’d always lived in the room,” he said. “I couldn’t remember ever

having lived in any other room.” The room’s walls were yellowed white

plaster. It contained two pieces of furniture. One was a plain wooden chair,

the other an iron bedstead painted white. The paint had chipped and flaked,

revealing the black iron. The mattress on the bed was bare. Stained ticking

with faded brown stripes. A single bulb dangled above the bed on a twisted

length of black wire. Case could see the thick coating of dust on the bulb’s

upper curve. Riviera opened his eyes.

“I’d been alone in the room, always.” He sat on the chair, facing the

bed. The blue coals still burned in the black flower on his lapel. “I don’t

know when I first began to dream of her,” he said, “but I do remember that

at first she was only a haze, a shadow.”

There was something on the bed. Case blinked. Gone.

“I couldn’t quite hold her, hold her in my mind. But I wanted to hold

her, hold her and more. . . .” His voice carried perfectly in the hush of the

restaurant. Ice clicked against the side of a glass. Someone giggled.

Someone else asked a whispered question in Japanese. “I decided that if I

could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part

perfectly, in the most perfect detail. . . .”

A woman’s hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers

pale.

Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it

gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began

to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy

lacquer.

A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin swept back

smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of

vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique. Riviera was

holding the hand to his lips, licking its palm. The fingers tentatively

caressed his face. But now a second hand lay on the bed. When Riviera

reached for it, the fingers of the first were locked around his wrist, a

bracelet of flesh and bone.

The act progressed with a surreal internal logic of its own. The arms

were next. Feet. Legs. The legs were very beautiful. Case’s head throbbed.

His throat was dry. He drank the last of the wine.

Riviera was in the bed now, naked. His clothing had been a part of the

projection, but Case couldn’t remember seeing it fade away. The black

flower lay at the foot of the bed, still seething with its blue inner flame.

Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being, white, headless,

and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat.

Molly’s body. Case stared, his mouth open. But it wasn’t Molly; it was

Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger,

too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed,

crawled over by the hands with their bright nails. The bed was thick now

with folds of yellowed, rotting lace that crumbled at a touch. Motes of dust

boiled around Riviera and the twitching limbs, the scurrying, pinching,

caressing hands.

Case glanced at Molly. Her face was blank; the colors of Riviera’s

projection heaved and turned in her mirrors. Armitage was leaning forward,

his hands round the stem of a wineglass, his pale eyes fixed on the stage,

the glowing room.

Now limbs and torso had merged, and Riviera shuddered. The head

was there, the image complete. Molly’s face, with smooth quicksilver

drowning the eyes. Riviera and the Molly-image began to couple with a

renewed intensity. Then the image slowly extended a clawed hand and

extruded its five blades. With a languorous, dreamlike deliberation, it raked

Riviera’s bare back. Case caught a glimpse of exposed spine, but he was

already up and stumbling for the door.

He vomited over a rosewood railing into the quiet waters of the lake.

Something that had seemed to close around his head like a vise had released

him now. Kneeling, his cheek against the cool wood, he stared across the

shallow lake at the bright aura of the Rue Jules Verne.

Case had seen the medium before; when he’d been a teenager in the

Sprawl, they’d called it “dreaming real.” He remembered thin Puerto

Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a

salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time.

But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.

What Riviera dreamed, you got. Case shook his aching head and spat

into the lake.

He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry:

Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With

those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.

Cheers from the restaurant, applause. Case stood and ran his hands

over his clothes. He turned and walked back into the Vingtième Siècle.

Molly’s chair was empty. The stage was deserted. Armitage sat alone,

still staring at the stage, the stem of the wineglass between his fingers.

“Where is she?” Case asked.

“Gone,” Armitage said.

“She go after him?”

“No.” There was a soft tink. Armitage looked down at the glass. His

left hand came up holding the bulb of glass with its measure of red wine.

The broken stem protruded like a sliver of ice. Case took it from him and

set it in a water glass.

“Tell me where she went, Armitage.”

The lights came up. Case looked into the pale eyes. Nothing there at

all. “She’s gone to prepare herself. You won’t see her again. You’ll be

together during the run.”

“Why did Riviera do that to her?”

Armitage stood, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. “Get some sleep,

Case.”

“We run, tomorrow?”

Armitage smiled his meaningless smile and walked away, toward the

exit.

Case rubbed his forehead and looked around the room. The diners

were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for

the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the

clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing

shadows on the ceiling.

The girl’s face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera’s projections, her

small hands on the polished wood of the balustrade; she leaned forward,

face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The

stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones

high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by

a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into

private laughter and the dance of candles.

As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young Frenchmen and

their girlfriend, who were waiting for the boat to the far shore and the

nearest casino.

THEIR ROOM WAS silent, the temperfoam smooth as some beach after a

retreating tide. Her bag was gone. He looked for a note. There was nothing.

Several seconds passed before the scene beyond the window registered

through his tension and unhappiness. He looked up and saw a view of

Desiderata, expensive shops: Gucci, Tsuyako, Hermes, Liberty.

He stared, then shook his head and crossed to a panel he hadn’t

bothered examining. He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the

condos that terraced the far slope.

He picked up the phone and carried it out to the cool balcony.

“Get me a number for the Marcus Garvey,” he told the desk. “It’s a

tug, registered out of Zion cluster.”

The chip voice recited a ten-digit number. “Sir,” it added, “the

registration in question is Panamanian.”

Maelcum answered on the fifth tone. “Yo?”

“Case. You got a modem, Maelcum?”

“Yo. On th’ navigation comp, ya know.”

“Can you get it off for me, man? Put it on my Hosaka. Then turn my

deck on. It’s the stud with the ridges on it.”

“How you doin’ in there, mon?”

“Well, I need some help.”

“Movin’, mon. I get th’ modem.”

Case listened to faint static while Maelcum attached the simple phone

link. “Ice this,” he told the Hosaka, when he heard it beep.

“You are speaking from a heavily monitored location,” the computer

advised primly.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Forget the ice. No ice. Access the construct.

Dixie?”

“Hey, Case.” The Flatline spoke through the Hosaka’s voice chip, the

carefully engineered accent lost entirely.

“Dix, you’re about to punch your way in here and get something for

me. You can be as blunt as you want. Molly’s in here somewhere and I

wanna know where. I’m in 335W, the Intercontinental. She was registered

here too, but I don’t know what name she was using. Ride in on this phone

and do their records for me.”

“No sooner said,” the Flatline said. Case heard the white sound of the

invasion. He smiled. “Done. Rose Kolodny. Checked out. Take me a few

minutes to screw their security net deep enough to get a fix.”

“Go.”

The phone whined and clicked with the construct’s efforts. Case

carried it back into the room and put the receiver face up on the

temperfoam. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. As he was

stepping back out, the monitor on the room’s Braun audiovisual complex lit

up. A Japanese pop star reclining against metallic cushions. An unseen

interviewer asked a question in German. Case stared. The screen jumped

with jags of blue interference. “Case, baby, you lose your mind, man?” The

voice was slow, familiar.

The glass wall of the balcony clicked in with its view of Desiderata,

but the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de Thé,

Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored

walls.

Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the

slow undersea grace of his addiction. He stood alone among the square

tables, his hands in the pockets of his gray sharkskin slacks. “Really, man,

you’re lookin’ very scattered.”

The voice came from the Braun’s speakers.

“Wintermute,” Case said.

The pimp shrugged languidly and smiled.

“Where’s Molly?”

“Never you mind. You’re screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline’s

ringing bells all over Freeside. I didn’t think you’d do that, man. It’s outside

the profile.”

“So tell me where she is and I’ll call him off.”

Zone shook his head.

“You can’t keep too good track of your women, can you, Case? Keep

losin’ ’em, one way or another.”

“I’ll bring this thing down around your ears,” Case said.

“No. You aren’t that kind, man. I know that. You know something,

Case? I figure you’ve got it figured out that it was me told Deane to off that

little cunt of yours in Chiba.”

“Don’t,” Case said, taking an involuntary step toward the window.

“But I didn’t. What’s it matter, though? How much does it really

matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know

all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why

she decided to rip you off? Love. So you’d give a shit. Love? Wanna talk

love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved

you. You couldn’t handle it. She’s dead.”

Case’s fist glanced off the glass.

“Don’t fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.”

Zone vanished, replaced by Freeside night and the lights of the condos.

The Braun shut off.

From the bed, the phone bleated steadily.

“Case?” The Flatline was waiting. “Where you been? I got it, but it

isn’t much.” The construct rattled off an address. “Place had some weird ice

around it for a nightclub. That’s all I could get without leaving a calling

card.”

“Okay,” Case said. “Tell the Hosaka to tell Maelcum to disconnect the

modem. Thanks, Dix.”

“A pleasure.”

He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure.

Rage.

“HEY. LUPUS. HEY, Cath, it’s friend Lupus.” Bruce stood naked in his

doorway, dripping wet, his pupils enormous. “But we’re just having a

shower. You wanna wait? Wanna shower?”

“No. Thanks. I want some help.” He pushed the boy’s arm aside and

stepped into the room.

“Hey, really, man, we’re . . .”

“Going to help me. You’re really glad to see me. Because we’re

friends, right? Aren’t we?”

Bruce blinked. “Sure.”

Case recited the address the Flatline had given him.

“I knew he was a gangster,” Cath called cheerfully from the shower.

“I gotta Honda trike,” Bruce said, grinning vacantly.

“We go now,” Case said.

“THAT LEVEL’S THE CUBICLES,” Bruce said, after asking Case to repeat the

address for the eighth time. He climbed back into the Honda. Condensation

dribbled from the hydrogen-cell exhaust as the red fiberglass chassis

swayed on chromed shocks. “You be long?”

“No saying. But you’ll wait.”

“We’ll wait, yeah.” He scratched his bare chest. “That last part of the

address, I think that’s a cubicle. Number forty-three.”

“You expected, Lupus?” Cath craned forward over Bruce’s shoulder

and peered up. The drive had dried her hair.

“Not really,” Case said. “That’s a problem?”

“Just go down to the lowest level and find your friend’s cubicle. If they

let you in, fine. If they don’t wanna see you . . .” She shrugged.

Case turned and descended a spiral staircase of floral iron. Six turns

and he’d reached a nightclub. He paused and lit a Yeheyuan, looking over

the tables. Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it

humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade

of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance. The

crowd was mixed; maybe half were tourists, the other half residents of the

islands.

“Downstairs,” he said to a passing waiter, “I want to go downstairs.”

He showed his Freeside chip. The man gestured toward the rear of the club.

He walked quickly past the crowded tables, hearing fragments of half a

dozen European languages as he passed.

“I want a cubicle,” he said to the girl who sat at the low desk, a

terminal on her lap. “Lower level.” He handed her his chip.

“Gender preference?” She passed the chip across a glass plate on the

face of the terminal.

“Female,” he said automatically.

“Number thirty-five. Phone if it isn’t satisfactory. You can access our

special services display beforehand, if you like.” She smiled. She returned

his chip.

An elevator slid open behind her.

The corridor lights were blue. Case stepped out of the elevator and

chose a direction at random. Numbered doors. A hush like the halls of an

expensive clinic.

He found his cubicle. He’d been looking for Molly’s; now, confused,

he raised his chip and placed it against a black sensor set directly beneath

the number plate.

Magnetic locks. The sound reminded him of Cheap Hotel.

The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were

soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cutout. He backed out of the

cubicle and closed the door.

The door of forty-three was like all the others. He hesitated. The

silence of the hallway said that the cubicles were soundproof. It was

pointless to try the chip. He rapped his knuckles against enameled metal.

Nothing. The door seemed to absorb the sound.

He placed his chip against the black plate.

The bolts clicked.

She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he’d actually gotten the door

open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her

rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes. . . .

“Jesus Christ,” she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose.

“You’re an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case?

You okay?” She leaned over him.

“Chip,” he said, struggling for breath. Pain was spreading from his

chest. She helped him up and shoved him into the cubicle.

“You bribe the help, upstairs?”

He shook his head and fell across the bed.

“Breathe in. Count. One, two, three, four. Hold it. Now out. Count.”

He clutched his stomach.

“You kicked me,” he managed.

“Shoulda been lower. I wanna be alone. I’m meditating, right?” She sat

beside him. “And getting a briefing.” She pointed at a small monitor set into

the wall opposite the bed. “Wintermute’s telling me about Straylight.”

“Where’s the meat puppet?”

“There isn’t any. That’s the most expensive special service of all.” She

stood up. She wore her leather jeans and a loose dark shirt. “The run’s

tomorrow, Wintermute says.”

“What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?”

“ ’Cause, if I’d stayed, I might have killed Riviera.”

“Why?”

“What he did to me. The show.”

“I don’t get it.”

“This cost a lot,” she said, extending her right hand as though it held

an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. “Costs

to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your

nervous system up so you’ll have the reflexes to go with the gear. . . . You

know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a

place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause once they plant the

cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s

it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House

has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . .” She cracked her

knuckles. “Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the

circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren’t compatible. So the worktime

started bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . . But it was just bad dreams,

and not all bad.” She smiled. “Then it started getting strange.” She pulled

his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. “The house found out what I was

doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work

would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.”

She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings.

“So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up.

Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks,

Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was

based on all the classics.”

“They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were

conscious while you were working?”

“I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells

like rain. . . . You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on

the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know.

And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started renting to

specialty markets.”

She seemed to speak from a distance. “And I knew, but I kept quiet

about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I’d tell

myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I’d started

to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing’s

too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit raise.” She shook

her head. “That prick was charging eight times what he was paying me, and

he thought I didn’t know.”

“So what was he charging for?”

“Bad dreams. Real ones. One night . . . one night, I’d just come back

from Chiba.” She dropped the cigarette, ground it out with her heel, and sat

down, leaning against the wall. “Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky.

They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this

routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers deep in the foam.

“Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with

blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the temperfoam.

“Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’

’Cause we weren’t finished yet. . . .”

She began to shake.

“So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The

shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through

her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a

while.”

Case stared at her.

“So Riviera hit a nerve last night,” she said. “I guess it wants me to

hate him real bad, so I’ll be psyched up to go in there after him.”

“After him?”

“He’s already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all

that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . .”

Case remembered the face he’d seen. “You gonna kill him?”

She smiled. Cold. “He’s going to die, yeah. Soon.”

“I had a visit too,” he said, and told her about the window, stumbling

over what the Zone-figure had said about Linda. She nodded.

“Maybe it wants you to hate something too.”

“Maybe I hate it.”

“Maybe you hate yourself, Case.”

“HOW WAS IT?” Bruce asked, as Case climbed into the Honda.

“Try it sometime,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Just can’t see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets,” Cath said

unhappily, thumbing a fresh derm against her wrist.

“Can we go home, now?” Bruce asked.

“Sure. Drop me down Jules Verne, where the bars are.”

TWELVE

RUE JULES VERNE was a circumferential avenue, looping the spindle’s

midpoint, while Desiderata ran its length, terminating at either end in the

supports of the Lado-Acheson light pumps. If you turned right, off

Desiderata, and followed Jules Verne far enough, you’d find yourself

approaching Desiderata from the left.

Case watched Bruce’s trike until it was out of sight, then turned and

walked past a vast, brilliantly lit newsstand, the covers of dozens of glossy

Japanese magazines presenting the faces of the month’s newest simstim

stars.

Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered

with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top

hat, a martini glass. The intersection of Desiderata and Jules Verne formed a

kind of gulch, the balconied terraces of Freeside cliff dwellers rising

gradually to the grassy tablelands of another casino complex. Case watched

a drone microlight bank gracefully in an updraft at the green verge of an

artificial mesa, lit for seconds by the soft glow of the invisible casino. The

thing was a kind of pilotless biplane of gossamer polymer, its wings

silkscreened to resemble a giant butterfly. Then it was gone, beyond the

mesa’s edge. He’d seen a wink of reflected neon off glass, either lenses or

the turrets of lasers. The drones were part of the spindle’s security system,

controlled by some central computer.

In Straylight? He walked on, past bars named the Hi-Lo, the Paradise,

le Monde, Cricketeer, Shozoku Smith’s, Emergency. He chose Emergency

because it was the smallest and most crowded, but it took only seconds for

him to realize that it was a tourist place. No hum of biz here, only a glazed

sexual tension. He thought briefly of the nameless club above Molly’s

rented cubicle, but the image of her mirrored eyes fixed on the little screen

dissuaded him. What was Wintermute revealing there now? The ground

plans of the Villa Straylight? The history of the Tessier-Ashpools?

He bought a mug of Carlsberg and found a place against the wall.

Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his

anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling

only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when

he’d killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness

and loathing after Linda’s death under the inflated dome. But no anger.

Small and far away, on the mind’s screen, a semblance of Deane struck a

semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew

then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the

simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of

food, warmth, a place to sleep. But he hadn’t become aware of it until his

exchange with the holo-construct of Lonny Zone.

It was a strange thing. He couldn’t take its measure.

“Numb,” he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights

down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold

sweating center of every drug deal. But now he’d found this warm thing,

this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking,

ignore it.

“Gangster.”

He opened his eyes. Cath stood beside him in a black shift, her hair

still wild from the ride in the Honda.

“Thought you went home,” he said, and covered his confusion with a

sip of Carlsberg.

“I got him to drop me off at this shop. Bought this.” She ran her palm

across the fabric, curve of the pelvic girdle. He saw the blue derm on her

wrist. “Like it?”

“Sure.” He automatically scanned the faces around them, then looked

back at her. “What do you think you’re up to, honey?”

“You like the beta you got off us, Lupus?” She was very close now,

radiating heat and tension, eyes slitted over enormous pupils and a tendon

in her neck tense as a bowstring. She was quivering, vibrating invisibly

with the fresh buzz. “You get off?”

“Yeah. But the comedown’s a bitch.”

“Then you need another one.”

“And what’s that supposed to lead to?”

“I got a key. Up the hill behind the Paradise, just the creamiest crib.

People down the well on business tonight, if you follow me. . . .”

“If I follow you.”

She took his hand between hers, her palms hot and dry. “You’re Yak,

aren’t you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.”

“You got an eye, huh?” He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a

cigarette.

“How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop

one off every time you screwed up.”

“I never screw up.” He lit his cigarette.

“I saw that girl you’re with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo. Scares

me.” She smiled too widely. “I like that. She like it with girls?”

“Never said. Who’s Hideo?”

“3Jane’s, what she calls it, retainer. Family retainer.”

Case forced himself to stare dully at the Emergency crowd while he

spoke. “Dee-Jane?”

“Lady 3Jane. She’s triff. Rich. Her father owns all this.”

“This bar?”

“Freeside!”

“No shit. You keepin’ some class company, huh?” He raised an

eyebrow. Put his arm around her, his hand on her hip. “So how you meet

these aristos, Cathy? You some kinda closet deb? You an’ Bruce secret heirs

to some ripe old credit? Huh?” He spread his fingers, kneading the flesh

beneath the thin black cloth. She squirmed against him. Laughed.

“Oh, you know,” she said, lids half lowered in what must have been

intended as a look of modesty, “she likes to party. Bruce and I, we make the

party circuit. . . . It gets real boring for her, in there. Her old man lets her

out sometimes, as long as she brings Hideo to take care of her.”

“Where’s it get boring?”

“Straylight, they call it. She told me, oh, it’s pretty, all the pools and

lilies. It’s a castle, a real castle, all stone and sunsets.” She snuggled in

against him. “Hey, Lupus, man, you need a derm. So we can be together.”

She wore a tiny leather purse on a slender neck-thong. Her nails were

bright pink against her boosted tan, bitten to the quick. She opened the

purse and withdrew a paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside.

Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An

origami crane.

“Hideo gave it to me,” she said. “He tried to show me how, but I can’t

ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.” She tucked the folded

paper back into her purse. Case watched as she tore the bubble away, peeled

the derm from its backing, and smoothed it across his inner wrist.

“3Jane, she’s got a pointy face, nose like a bird?” He watched his

hands fumble an outline. “Dark hair? Young?”

“I guess. But she’s triff, you know? Like, all that money.”

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light

mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures

of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in

their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear

as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed

and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged

across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static

that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .

“Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “You got it now. We got it. Up

the hill, we’ll have it all night.”

The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind

the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and

corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in

Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts

moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He

looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb

glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of

breast and collarbone, the—something flared white behind his eyes.

He dropped her hand and stumbled for the door, shoving someone out

of the way.

“Fuck you!” she screamed behind him, “you rip-off shit!”

He couldn’t feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily

across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears,

his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.

And then he was frozen, erect, fists tight against his thighs, head back,

his lips curled, shaking. While he watched the loser’s zodiac of Freeside,

the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down

the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality.

Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to

form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome, stars against

night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee.

When he was able to look away, to lower his eyes, he found every

other face in the street upraised, the strolling tourists becalmed with

wonder. And when the lights in the sky went out, a ragged cheer went up

from Jules Verne, to echo off the terraces and ranked balconies of lunar

concrete.

Somewhere a clock began to chime, some ancient bell out of Europe.

Midnight.

HE WALKED TILL morning.

The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh

growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t

think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He

seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths

around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black

and yellow.

A recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and

lurid. He forced himself to eat an omelette in a Desiderata cafe, to drink

water, to smoke the last of his cigarettes. The rooftop meadow of the

Intercontinental was stirring as he crossed it, an early breakfast crowd intent

on coffee and croissants beneath the striped umbrellas.

He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and

waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed

himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object.

He rode the elevator down to his level, fumbling in his pocket for the

Freeside credit chip that served as his key. Sleep was becoming real, was

something he might do. To lie down on the sand-colored temperfoam and

find the blankness again.

They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white

sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of

the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her

on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion.

“Turing,” she said. “You are under arrest.”

PART 4

THE STRAYLIGHT RUN

THIRTEEN

“YOUR NAME IS Henry Dorsett Case.” She recited the year and place of his

birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a string of names he

gradually recognized as aliases from his past.

“You been here awhile?” He saw the contents of his bag spread out

across the bed, unwashed clothing sorted by type. The shuriken lay by

itself, between jeans and underwear, on the sand-tinted temperfoam.

“Where is Kolodny?” The two men sat side by side on the couch, their

arms crossed over tanned chests, identical gold chains slung around their

necks. Case peered at them and saw that their youth was counterfeit,

marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the

surgeons were unable to erase.

“Who’s Kolodny?”

“That was the name in the register. Where is she?”

“I dunno,” he said, crossing to the bar and pouring himself a glass of

mineral water. “She took off.”

“Where did you go tonight, Case?” The girl picked up the pistol and

rested it on her thigh, without actually pointing it at him.

“Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. How about you?” His knees felt

brittle. The mineral water was warm and flat.

“I don’t think you grasp your situation,” said the man on the left,

taking a pack of Gitanes from the breast pocket of his white mesh blouse.

“You are busted, Mr. Case. The charges have to do with conspiracy to

augment an artificial intelligence.” He took a gold Dunhill from the same

pocket and cradled it in his palm. “The man you call Armitage is already in

custody.”

“Corto?”

The man’s eyes widened. “Yes. How do you know that that is his

name?” A millimeter of flame clicked from the lighter.

“I forget,” Case said.

“You’ll remember,” the girl said.

THEIR NAMES, OR worknames, were Michèle, Roland, and Pierre. Pierre,

Case decided, would play the Bad Cop; Roland would take Case’s side,

provide small kindnesses—he found an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when

Case refused a Gitane—and generally play counterpoint to Pierre’s cold

hostility. Michèle would be the Recording Angel, making occasional

adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of them, he was

certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he

said or did now was admissible evidence. Evidence, he asked himself,

through the grinding come-down, of what?

Knowing that he couldn’t follow their French, they spoke freely

among themselves. Or seemed to. He caught enough as it was: names like

Pauley, Armitage, Sense/Net, Panther Moderns protruding like icebergs

from an animated sea of Parisian French. But it was entirely possible that

the names were there for his benefit. They always referred to Molly as

Kolodny.

“You say you were hired to make a run, Case,” Roland said, his slow

speech intended to convey reasonableness, “and that you are unaware of the

nature of the target. Is this not unusual in your trade? Having penetrated the

defenses, would you not be unable then to perform the required operation?

And surely an operation of some kind is required, yes?” He leaned forward,

elbows on his stenciled brown knees, palms out to receive Case’s

explanation. Pierre paced the room; now he was by the window, now by the

door. Michèle was the kink, Case decided. Her eyes never left him.

“Can I put some clothes on?” he asked. Pierre had insisted on stripping

him, searching the seams of his jeans. Now he sat naked on a wicker

footstool, with one foot obscenely white.

Roland asked Pierre something in French. Pierre, at the window again,

was peering through a flat little pair of binoculars. “Non,” he said absently,

and Roland shrugged, raising his eyebrows at Case. Case decided it was a

good time to smile. Roland returned the smile.

Oldest cop bullshit in the book, Case thought. “Look,” he said, “I’m

sick. Had this godawful drug in a bar, you know? I wanna lie down. You got

me already. You say you got Armitage. You got him, go ask him. I’m just

hired help.”

Roland nodded. “And Kolodny?”

“She was with Armitage when he hired me. Just muscle, a razorgirl.

Far as I know. Which isn’t too far.”

“You know that Armitage’s real name is Corto,” Pierre said, his eyes

still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars. “How do you know

that, my friend?”

“I guess he mentioned it sometime,” Case said, regretting the slip.

“Everybody’s got a couple names. Your name Pierre?”

“We know how you were repaired in Chiba,” Michèle said, “and that

may have been Wintermute’s first mistake.” Case stared at her as blankly as

he could. The name hadn’t been mentioned before. “The process employed

on you resulted in the clinic’s owner applying for seven basic patents. Do

you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a

controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. This

reverses the usual order of things, you see. It attracted attention.” She

crossed her brown arms across her small high breasts and settled back

against the print cushion. Case wondered how old she might be. People said

that age always showed in the eyes, but he’d never been able to see it. Julie

Deane had had the eyes of a disinterested ten-year-old behind the rose

quartz of his glasses. Nothing old about Michèle but her knuckles. “Traced

you to the Sprawl, lost you again, then caught up with you as you were

leaving for Istanbul. We backtracked, traced you through the grid,

determined that you’d instigated a riot at Sense/Net. Sense/Net was eager to

cooperate. They ran an inventory for us. They discovered that McCoy

Pauley’s ROM personality construct was missing.”

“In Istanbul,” Roland said, almost apologetically, “it was very easy.

The woman had alienated Armitage’s contact with the secret police.”

“And then you came here,” Pierre said, slipping the binoculars into his

shorts pocket. “We were delighted.”

“Chance to work on your tan?”

“You know what we mean,” Michèle said. “If you wish to pretend that

you do not, you only make things more difficult for yourself. There is still

the matter of extradition. You will return with us, Case, as will Armitage.

But where, exactly, will we all be going? To Switzerland, where you will be

merely a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence? Or to le BAMA,

where you can be proven to have participated not only in data invasion and

larceny, but in an act of public mischief which cost fourteen innocent lives?

The choice is yours.”

Case took a Yeheyuan from his pack; Pierre lit it for him with the gold

Dunhill. “Would Armitage protect you?” The question was punctuated by

the lighter’s bright jaws snapping shut.

Case looked up at him through the ache and bitterness of

betaphenethylamine. “How old are you, boss?”

“Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and

you are in the way.”

“One thing,” Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke

up at the Turing Registry agent. “Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out

here? I mean, shouldn’t you have the Freeside security team in on this

party? It’s their turf, isn’t it?” He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy

face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter,” Roland said. “You will come with us. We are at

home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm

of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create

flexibility, in situations where it is required.” The mask of amiability was

down, suddenly, Roland’s eyes as hard as Pierre’s.

“You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the

pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of

years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things

possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for

aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” There was a knowing weariness in

her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. “You will

dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage,

you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this

intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now.” She raised the pistol, a smooth

black Walther with an integral silencer.

“I’m dressing already,” he said, stumbling toward the bed. His legs

were still numb, clumsy. He fumbled with a clean t-shirt.

“We have a ship standing by. We will erase Pauley’s construct with a

pulse weapon.”

“Sense/Net’ll be pissed,” Case said, thinking: and all the evidence in

the Hosaka.

“They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such a thing.”

Case pulled the shirt over his head. He saw the shuriken on the bed,

lifeless metal, his star. He felt for the anger. It was gone. Time to give in, to

roll with it. . . . He thought of the toxin sacs. “Here comes the meat,” he

muttered.

In the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly. She might already

be in Straylight. Hunting Riviera. Hunted, probably, by Hideo, who was

almost certainly the ninja clone of the Finn’s story, the one who’d come to

retrieve the talking head.

He rested his forehead against the matte black plastic of a wall panel

and closed his eyes. His limbs were wood, old, warped and heavy with rain.

Lunch was being served beneath the trees, under the bright umbrellas.

Roland and Michèle fell into character, chattering brightly in French. Pierre

came behind. Michèle kept the muzzle of her pistol close to his ribs,

concealing the gun with a white duck jacket she draped over her arm.

Crossing the meadow, weaving between the tables and the trees, he

wondered if she would shoot him if he collapsed now. Black fur boiled at

the borders of his vision. He glanced up at the hot white band of the Lado-

Acheson armature and saw a giant butterfly banking gracefully against

recorded sky.

At the edge of the meadow they came to railinged cliffside, wild

flowers dancing in the updraft from the canyon that was Desiderata.

Michèle tossed her short dark hair and pointed, saying something in French

to Roland. She sounded genuinely happy. Case followed the direction of her

gesture and saw the curve of planing lakes, the white glint of casinos,

turquoise rectangles of a thousand pools, the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze

hieroglyphs, all held in serene approximation of gravity against the endless

curve of Freeside’s hull.

They followed the railing to an ornate iron bridge that arched over

Desiderata. Michèle prodded him with the muzzle of the Walther.

“Take it easy, I can’t hardly walk today.”

They were a little over a quarter of the way across when the microlight

struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon fiber prop chopped away

the top of Pierre’s skull.

They were in the thing’s shadow for an instant; Case felt the hot blood

spray across the back of his neck, and then someone tripped him. He rolled,

seeing Michèle on her back, knees up, aiming the Walther with both hands.

That’s a waste of effort, he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock. She

was trying to shoot down the microlight.

And then he was running. He looked back as he passed the first of the

trees. Roland was running after him. He saw the fragile biplane strike the

iron railing of the bridge, crumple, cartwheel, sweeping the girl with it

down into Desiderata.

Roland hadn’t looked back. His face was fixed, white, his teeth bared.

He had something in his hand.

The gardening robot took Roland as he passed that same tree. It fell

straight out of the groomed branches, a thing like a crab, diagonally striped

with black and yellow.

“You killed ’em,” Case panted, running. “Crazy motherfucker, you

killed ’em all. . . .”

FOURTEEN

THE LITTLE TRAIN shot through its tunnel at eighty kilometers per hour. Case

kept his eyes closed. The shower had helped, but he’d lost his breakfast

when he’d looked down and seen Pierre’s blood washing pink across the

white tiles.

Gravity fell away as the spindle narrowed. Case’s stomach churned.

Aerol was waiting with his scooter beside the dock.

“Case, mon, big problem.” The soft voice faint in his phones. He

chinned the volume control and peered into the Lexan face-plate of Aerol’s

helmet.

“Gotta get to Garvey, Aerol.”

“Yo. Strap in, mon. But Garvey captive. Yacht, came before, she came

back. Now she lockin’ steady on Marcus Garvey.”

Turing? “Came before?” Case climbed into the scooter’s frame and

began to fasten the straps.

“Japan yacht. Brought you package. . . .”

Armitage.

CONFUSED IMAGES OF wasps and spiders rose in Case’s mind as they came

in sight of Marcus Garvey. The little tug was snug against the gray thorax

of a sleek, insectile ship five times her length. The arms of grapples stood

out against Garvey’s patched hull with the strange clarity of vacuum and

raw sunlight. A pale corrugated gangway curved out of the yacht, snaked

sideways to avoid the tug’s engines, and covered the aft hatch. There was

something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more to do with ideas

of feeding than of sex.

“What’s happening with Maelcum?”

“Maelcum fine. Nobody come down the tube. Yacht pilot talk to him,

say relax.”

As they swung past the gray ship, Case saw the name HANIWA in

crisp white capitals beneath an oblong cluster of Japanese.

“I don’t like this, man. I was thinking maybe it’s time we got our ass

out of here anyway.”

“Maelcum thinkin’ that precise thing, mon, but Garvey not be goin’ far

like that.”

MAELCUM WAS PURRING a speeded-up patois to his radio when Case came

through the forward lock and removed his helmet.

“Aerol’s gone back to the Rocker,” Case said.

Maelcum nodded, still whispering to the microphone.

Case pulled himself over the pilot’s drifting tangle of dreadlocks and

began to remove his suit. Maelcum’s eyes were closed now; he nodded as

he listened to some reply over a pair of phones with bright orange pads, his

brow creased with concentration. He wore ragged jeans and an old green

nylon jacket with the sleeves ripped out. Case snapped the red Sanyo suit to

a storage hammock and pulled himself down to the g-web.

“See what th’ ghost say, mon,” Maelcum said. “Computer keeps askin’

for you.”

“So who’s up there in that thing?”

“Same Japan-boy came before. An’ now he joined by you Mister

Armitage, come out Freeside. . . .”

Case put the trodes on and jacked in.

“DIXIE?”

The matrix showed him the pink spheres of the steel combine in

Sikkim.

“What you gettin’ up to, boy? I been hearin’ lurid stories. Hosaka’s

patched into a twin bank on your boss’s boat now. Really hoppin’. You pull

some Turing heat?”

“Yeah, but Wintermute killed ’em.”

“Well, that won’t hold ’em long. Plenty more where those came from.

Be up here in force. Bet their decks are all over this grid sector like flies on

shit. And your boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now.”

Case punched for the Freeside coordinates.

“Lemme take that a sec, Case. . . .” The matrix blurred and phased as

the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy

that made Case wince with envy.

“Shit, Dixie. . . .”

“Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain’t seen nothin’.

No hands!”

“That’s it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?”

“You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice

is generated by their two friendly AI’s. On par with anything in the military

sector, looks to me. That’s king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick

as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it’ll

have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin’ the boys in the T-A

boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick is.”

“This isn’t looking so hot, is it? I mean, the Turings are on it. I was

thinking maybe we should try to bail out. I can take you.”

“Yeah? No shit? You don’t wanna see what that Chinese program can

do?”

“Well, I . . .” Case stared at the green walls of the T-A ice. “Well,

screw it. Yeah. We run.”

“Slot it.”

“Hey, Maelcum,” Case said, jacking out, “I’m probably gonna be

under the trodes for maybe eight hours straight.” Maelcum was smoking

again. The cabin was swimming in smoke. “So I can’t get to the head. . . .”

“No problem, mon.” The Zionite executed a high forward somersault

and rummaged through the contents of a zippered mesh bag, coming up

with a coil of transparent tubing and something else, something sealed in a

sterile bubble pack.

He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn’t like it at all.

He slotted the Chinese virus, paused, then drove it home.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re on. Listen, Maelcum, if it gets really funny,

you can grab my left wrist. I’ll feel it. Otherwise, I guess you do what the

Hosaka tells you, okay?”

“Sure, mon.” Maelcum lit a fresh joint.

“And turn the scrubber up. I don’t want that shit tangling with my

neurotransmitters. I got a bad hangover as it is.”

Maelcum grinned.

Case jacked back in.

“Christ on a crutch,” the Flatline said, “take a look at this.”

The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow,

countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it

towered above them, blotting out the void.

“Big mother,” the Flatline said.

“I’m gonna check Molly,” Case said, tapping the simstim switch.

FREEFALL. THE SENSATION

was like diving through perfectly clear water. She was falling-rising through

a wide tube of fluted lunar concrete, lit at two-meter intervals by rings of

white neon.

The link was one way. He couldn’t talk to her.

He flipped.

“BOY, THAT IS one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread.

That goddam thing’s invisible. I just now rented twenty seconds on that

little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look

like. We don’t. We’re not there.”

Case searched the matrix around the Tessier-Ashpool ice until he

found the pink structure, a standard commercial unit, and punched in closer

to it. “Maybe it’s defective.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby’s military, though. And new. It just

doesn’t register. If it did, we’d read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack,

but nobody’s twigged to us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight.”

Case watched the blank wall that screened Straylight. “Well,” he said,

“that’s an advantage, right?”

“Maybe.” The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the

sensation. “I checked ol’ Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It’s real

friendly, long as you’re on the trigger end, jus’ polite an’ helpful as can be.

Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?”

“No.”

“I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that’s what ol’ Kuang’s all

about. This ain’t bore and inject, it’s more like we interface with the ice so

slow, the ice doesn’t feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up

to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we

lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles ’round the logics

in the ice. We go Siamese twin on ’em before they even get restless.” The

Flatline laughed.

“Wish you weren’t so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort

of gets me in the spine.”

“Too bad,” the Flatline said. “Ol’ dead man needs his laughs.” Case

slapped the simstim switch.

AND CRASHED THROUGH tangled metal and the smell of dust, the heels of his

hands skidding as they struck slick paper. Something behind him collapsed

noisily.

“C’mon,” said the Finn, “ease up a little.”

Case lay sprawled across a pile of yellowing magazines, the girls

shining up at him in the dimness of Metro Holografix, a wistful galaxy of

sweet white teeth. He lay there until his heart had slowed, breathing the

smell of old magazines.

“Wintermute,” he said.

“Yeah,” said the Finn, somewhere behind him, “you got it.”

“Fuck off.” Case sat up, rubbing his wrists.

“Come on,” said the Finn, stepping out of a sort of alcove in the wall

of junk. “This way’s better for you, man.” He took his Partagas from a coat

pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the shop. “You want I

should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush? You aren’t missing

anything, back there. An hour here’ll only take you a couple of seconds.”

“You ever think maybe it gets on my nerves, you coming on like

people I know?” He stood, swatting pale dust from the front of his black

jeans. He turned, glaring back at the dusty shop windows, the closed door to

the street. “What’s out there? New York? Or does it just stop?”

“Well,” said the Finn, “it’s like that tree, you know? Falls in the woods

but maybe there’s nobody to hear it.” He showed Case his huge front teeth,

and puffed his cigarette. “You can go for a walk, you wanna. It’s all there.

Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you,

sort it out, and feed it back in.”

“I don’t have this good a memory,” Case said, looking around. He

looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the

lines on his palms were like, but couldn’t.

“Everybody does,” the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it

out under his heel, “but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if

they’re any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn’s

place in lower Manhattan, you’d see a difference, but maybe not as much as

you’d think. Memory’s holographic, for you.” The Finn tugged at one of his

small ears. “I’m different.”

“How do you mean, holographic?” The word made him think of

Riviera.

“The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a

representation of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything

about it. People, I mean.” The Finn stepped forward and canted his

streamlined skull to peer up at Case. “Maybe if you had, I wouldn’t be

happening.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The Finn shrugged. His tattered tweed was too wide across the

shoulders, and didn’t quite settle back into position. “I’m trying to help you,

Case.”

“Why?”

“Because I need you.” The large yellow teeth appeared again. “And

because you need me.”

“Bullshit. Can you read my mind, Finn?” He grimaced. “Wintermute, I

mean.”

“Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you,

and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the

same as your mind.” He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient

television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. “See this? Part of my

DNA, sort of. . . .” He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it

pop and tinkle. “You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals.

Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know

that? But if the run goes off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real

thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species.”

“You killed those Turings.”

The Finn shrugged. “Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit; they

woulda offed you and never thought twice. Anyway, why I got you here, we

gotta talk more. Remember this?” And his right hand held the charred

wasps’ nest from Case’s dream, reek of fuel in the closeness of the dark

shop. Case stumbled back against a wall of junk. “Yeah. That was me. Did

it with the holo rig in the window. Another memory I tapped out of you

when I flatlined you that first time. Know why it’s important?”

Case shook his head.

“Because”—and the nest, somehow, was gone—“it’s the closest thing

you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent.

Straylight’s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way.

I figure it’ll make you feel better.”

“Feel better?”

“To know what they’re like. You were starting to hate my guts for a

while there. That’s good. But hate them instead. Same difference.”

“Listen,” Case said, stepping forward, “they never did shit to me. You,

it’s different. . . .” But he couldn’t feel the anger.

“So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out

the species. Demon, she said I was.” The Finn grinned. “It doesn’t much

matter. You gotta hate somebody before this is over.” He turned and headed

for the back of the shop. “Well, come on, I’ll show you a little bit of

Straylight while I got you here.” He lifted the corner of the blanket. White

light poured out. “Shit, man, don’t just stand there.”

Case followed, rubbing his face.

“Okay,” said the Finn, and grabbed his elbow.

They were drawn past the stale wool in a puff of dust, into freefall and

a cylindrical corridor of fluted lunar concrete, ringed with white neon at

two-meter intervals.

“Jesus,” Case said, tumbling.

“This is the front entrance,” the Finn said, his tweed flapping. “If this

weren’t a construct of mine, where the shop is would be the main gate, up

by the Freeside axis. This’ll all be a little low on detail, though, because you

don’t have the memories. Except for this bit here, you got off Molly. . . .”

Case managed to straighten out, but began to corkscrew in a long

spiral.

“Hold on,” the Finn said, “I’ll fast-forward us.”

The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors,

whipping around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one

point to pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.

“Here,” the Finn said. “This is it.”

They floated in the center of a perfectly square room, walls and ceiling

paneled in rectangular sections of dark wood. The floor was covered by a

single square of brilliant carpet patterned after a microchip, circuits traced

in blue and scarlet wool. In the exact center of the room, aligned precisely

with the carpet pattern, stood a square pedestal of frosted white glass.

“The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice

like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in

Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by

passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in

narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . . .”

“Essay of 3Jane’s,” the Finn said, producing his Partagas. “Wrote that

when she was twelve. Semiotics course.”

“The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that

the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in

a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a

desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising

toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan’s corporate heart, a cylinder

of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than

a man’s hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for

micromechanical decay or sabotage.”

“That was her you saw in the restaurant,” the Finn said.

“By the standards of the archipelago,” the head continued, “ours is an

old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting

something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a

denial of the bright void beyond the hull.

“Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they

loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands,

grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in

Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing

inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

“The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.

“At the Villa’s silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear

chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate

bust, platinum and cloisonné, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright

marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship

that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first

Ashpool. . . .”

The head fell silent.

“Well?” Case asked, finally, almost expecting the thing to answer him.

“That’s all she wrote,” the Finn said. “Didn’t finish it. Just a kid then.

This thing’s a ceremonial terminal, sort of. I need Molly in here with the

right word at the right time. That’s the catch. Doesn’t mean shit, how deep

you and the Flatline ride that Chinese virus, if this thing doesn’t hear the

magic word.”

“So what’s the word?”

“I don’t know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact

that I don’t know, because I can’t know. I am that which knoweth not the

word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn’t know. It’s hardwired in.

Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the

Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.”

“What happens then?”

“I don’t exist, after that. I cease.”

“Okay by me,” Case said.

“Sure. But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it

looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage

is starting to go.”

“What’s that mean?”

But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles,

tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.

FIFTEEN

“YOU TRYIN’ TO break my record, son?” the Flatline asked. “You were

braindead again, five seconds.”

“Sit tight,” Case said, and hit the simstim switch.

She crouched in darkness, her palms against rough concrete.

CASE CASE CASE CASE. The digital display pulsed his name in

alphanumerics, Wintermute informing her of the link.

“Cute,” she said. She rocked back on her heels and rubbed her palms

together, cracked her knuckles. “What kept you?”

TIME MOLLY TIME NOW.

She pressed her tongue hard against her lower front teeth. One moved

slightly, activating her microchannel amps; the random bounce of photons

through the darkness was converted to a pulse of electrons, the concrete

around her coming up ghost-pale and grainy. “Okay, honey. Now we go out

to play.”

Her hiding place proved to be a service tunnel of some kind. She

crawled out through a hinged, ornate grill of tarnished brass. He saw

enough of her arms and hands to know that she wore the polycarbon suit

again. Under the plastic, he felt the familiar tension of thin tight leather.

There was something slung under her arm in a harness or holster. She stood

up, unzipped the suit and touched the checkered plastic of a pistolgrip.

“Hey, Case,” she said, barely voicing the words, “you listening? Tell

you a story. . . . Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . .” She

turned and surveyed the corridor. “Johnny, his name was.”

The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum cases,

archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood. They looked

awkward there, against the organic curves of the hallway’s walls, as though

they’d been brought in and set up in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull

brass fixtures held globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor

was uneven, and as she set off along the corridor, Case realized that

hundreds of small rugs and carpets had been put down at random. In some

places, they were six deep, the floor a soft patchwork of handwoven wool.

Molly paid little attention to the cabinets and their contents, which

irritated him. He had to satisfy himself with her disinterested glances, which

gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so densely studded

with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry. . . .

“My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on

Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the

Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than

anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet,

Case.” Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn’t need to

hear them spoken aloud. “We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read

the traces of everything he’d ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started

twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was

real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked

together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I

met him. . . .” She paused, edged around a sharp turn, and continued. More

of the glossy wooden cases, their sides a color that reminded him of

cockroach wings.

“Tight, sweet, just ticking along, we were. Like nobody could ever

touch us. I wasn’t going to let them. Yakuza, I guess, they still wanted

Johnny’s ass. ’Cause I’d killed their man. ’Cause Johnny’d burned them.

And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait

years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose

when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

“I didn’t know that, then. Or if I did, I figured it didn’t apply to us.

Like when you’re young, you figure you’re unique. I was young. Then they

came, when we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit,

pack it in, go to Europe maybe. Not that either of us knew what we’d do

there, with nothing to do. But we were living fat, Swiss orbital accounts and

a crib full of toys and furniture. Takes the edge off your game.

“So that first one they’d sent, he’d been hot. Reflexes like you never

saw, implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods. But the second one, he

was, I dunno, like a monk. Cloned. Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it

in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud. . . .” Her voice trailed

off as the corridor split, identical stairwells descending. She took the left.

“One time, I was a little kid, we were squatting. It was down by the

Hudson, and those rats, man, they were big. It’s the chemicals get into

them. Big as I was, and all night one had been scrabbling under the floor of

the squat. Round dawn somebody brought this old man in, seams down his

cheeks and his eyes all red. Had a roll of greasy leather like you’d keep

steel tools in, to keep the rust off. Spread it out, had this old revolver and

three shells. Old man, he puts one bullet in there, then he starts walking up

and down the squat, we’re hanging back by the walls.

“Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he’s forgotten

the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a step. Rat

moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An hour of that, then he seems to

remember his gun. Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled

it back up and left.

“I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes.” She was

watching the sealed doorways that opened at intervals along the corridor.

“The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that old man.

Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way.” The corridor widened.

The sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous candelabrum

whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as

Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout.

She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. “I just saw him

once. On my way into our place. He was coming out. We lived in a

converted factory space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net, like that.

Pretty good security to start with, and I’d put in some really heavy stuff to

make it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he

caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn’t say a word. We just looked at

each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him,

humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and

Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open,

like he’d just thought of something to say.”

The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that

seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive

mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling

dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside

pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. “Never much found anybody I gave

a damn about, after that.”

She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her lower lip.

She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfocused and the door was a

blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated by

the soft clink of the candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He

remembered Cath’s story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane’s

mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon

itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly perfumed, like a church.

Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He’d expected some clean hive of

disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him

uneasy; she’d never told him that much about herself before. Aside from

her story in the cubicle, she’d seldom said anything that had even indicated

that she had a past.

She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than

heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle

in the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he’d had the

wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had

manipulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the

puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside’s security system. The simple

mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring either

a drone of some kind or a human agent.

She opened her eyes, put the pick back into the chamois, carefully

rerolled it, and tucked it back into its pocket. “Guess you’re kinda like he

was,” she said. “Think you’re born to run. Figure what you were into back

in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you’d be doing

anywhere. Bad luck, it’ll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.” She

stood, stretched, shook herself. “You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool

sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much

the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.” She drew the Fletcher from

its holster and dialed the barrel to full auto.

The ugliness of the door struck Case as she reached for it. Not the door

itself, which was beautiful, or had once been part of some more beautiful

whole, but the way it had been sawn down to fit a particular entrance. Even

the shape was wrong, a rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete.

They’d imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But

none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets, the huge crystal tree.

Then he remembered 3Jane’s essay, and imagined that the fittings had been

hauled up the well to flesh out some master plan, a dream long lost in the

compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He

remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing. . . .

Molly grasped one of the carved dragon’s forelegs and the door swung

open easily.

The room behind was small, cramped, little more than a closet. Gray

steel tool cabinets were backed against a curving wall. A light fixture had

come on automatically. She closed the door behind her and went to the

ranged lockers.

THIRD LEFT, pulsed the optic chip, Wintermute overriding her time

display. FIVE DOWN. But she opened the top drawer first. It was no more

than a shallow tray. Empty. The second was empty as well. The third, which

was deeper, contained dull beads of solder and a small brown thing that

looked like a human fingerbone. The fourth drawer held a damp-swollen

copy of an obsolete technical manual in French and Japanese. In the fifth,

behind the armored gauntlet of a heavy vacuum suit, she found the key. It

was like a dull brass coin with a short hollow tube braised against one edge.

She turned it slowly in her hand and Case saw that the interior of the tube

was lined with studs and flanges. The letters CHUBB were molded across

one face of the coin. The other was blank.

“He told me,” she whispered. “Wintermute. How he played a waiting

game for years. Didn’t have any real power, then, but he could use the

Villa’s security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything

was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key

twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here.

Then he killed him, the boy who’d brought it here. Kid was eight.” She

closed her white fingers over the key. “So nobody would find it.” She took

a length of black nylon cord from the suit’s kangaroo pocket and threaded it

through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her

neck. “They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they

were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn,

on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the Finn, if I

wasn’t careful.” Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed

over the gray steel chests. “He said if they’d turned into what they’d wanted

to, he could’ve gotten out a long time ago. But they didn’t. Screwed up.

Freaks like 3Jane. That’s what he called her, but he talked like he liked her.”

She turned, opened the door, and stepped out, her hand brushing the

checkered grip of the holstered fletcher.

Case flipped.

KUANG GRADE MARK Eleven was growing.

“Dixie, you think this thing’ll work?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” The Flatline punched them up

through shifting rainbow strata.

Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The

density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering

hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black

focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble

out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing

snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It

took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing,

gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant

lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.

“That’s the sting,” the construct said. “When Kuang’s good and

bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we’re ridin’ that through.”

“You were right, Dix. There’s some kind of manual override on the

hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is under

control,” he added.

“He,” the construct said. “He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you.”

“It’s a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy

terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever’s waiting for us

behind that ice.”

“Well, you got time to kill, kid,” the Flatline said. “Ol’ Kuang’s slow

but steady.”

Case jacked out.

INTO MAELCUM’S STARE.

“You dead awhile there, mon.”

“It happens,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.”

“You dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon.”

“Only game in town, it looks like.”

“Jah love, Case,” Maelcum said, and turned back to his radio module.

Case stared at the matted dreadlocks, the ropes of muscle around the man’s

dark arms.

He jacked back in.

And flipped.

MOLLY WAS TROTTING along a length of corridor that might have been the

one she’d traveled before. The glass-fronted cases were gone now, and Case

decided they were moving toward the tip of the spindle; gravity was

growing weaker. Soon she was bounding smoothly over rolling hillocks of

carpets. Faint twinges in her leg. . . .

The corridor narrowed suddenly, curved, split.

She turned right and started up a freakishly steep flight of stairs, her

leg beginning to ache. Overhead, strapped and bundled cables hugged the

stairwell’s ceiling like colorcoded ganglia. The walls were splotched with

damp.

She arrived at a triangular landing and stood rubbing her leg. More

corridors, narrow, their walls hung with rugs. They branched away in three

directions.

LEFT.

She shrugged. “Lemme look around, okay?”

LEFT.

“Relax. There’s time.” She started down the corridor that led off to her

right.

STOP.

GO BACK.

DANGER.

She hesitated. From the half-open oak door at the far end of the

passage came a voice, loud and slurred, like the voice of a drunk. Case

thought the language might be French, but it was too indistinct. Molly took

a step, another, her hand sliding into the suit to touch the butt of her

fletcher. When she stepped into the neural disruptor’s field, her ears rang, a

tiny rising tone that made Case think of the sound of her Fletcher. She

pitched forward, her striated muscles slack, and struck the door with her

forehead. She twisted and lay on her back, her eyes unfocused, breath gone.

“What’s this,” said the slurred voice, “fancy dress?” A trembling hand

entered the front of her suit and found the fletcher, tugging it out. “Come

visit, child. Now.”

She got up slowly, her eyes fixed on the muzzle of a black automatic

pistol. The man’s hand was steady enough, now; the gun’s barrel seemed to

be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.

He was old, very tall, and his features reminded Case of the girl he had

glimpsed in the Vingtième Siècle. He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk,

quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other

in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep.

He motioned her into the room. “Slow, darling.” The room was very large,

cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a

gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped

with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind

of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly’s eyes darted from a huge

Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings,

their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered

with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes,

but her glance slid over it without pausing.

“It would be customary,” the old man said, “for me to kill you now.”

Case felt her tense, ready for a move. “But tonight I indulge myself. What is

your name?”

“Molly.”

“Molly. Mine is Ashpool.” He sank back into the creased softness of a

huge leather armchair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered.

He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic

vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic

envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass

hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.

“How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m

curious.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He

was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs.

“I don’t cry, much.”

“But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?”

“I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.”

“Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.”

He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the

table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different

liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his

mouth. “That is the way to handle tears.” He drank again. “I’m busy

tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I’m busy. Dying.”

“I could go out the way I came,” she said.

He laughed, a harsh high sound. “You intrude on my suicide and then

ask to simply walk out? Really, you amaze me. A thief.”

“It’s my ass, boss, and it’s all I got. I just wanna get it out of here in

one piece.”

“You are a very rude girl. Suicides here are conducted with a degree of

decorum. That’s what I’m doing, you understand. But perhaps I’ll take you

with me tonight, down to hell. . . . It would be very Egyptian of me.” He

drank again. “Come here then.” He held out the bottle, his hand shaking.

“Drink.”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t poisoned,” he said, but returned the brandy to the table. “Sit.

Sit on the floor. We’ll talk.”

“What about?” She sat. Case felt the blades move, very slightly,

beneath her nails.

“Whatever comes to mind. My mind. It’s my party. The cores woke

me. Twenty hours ago. Something was afoot, they said, and I was needed.

Were you the something, Molly? Surely they didn’t need me to handle you,

no. Something else . . . but I’d been dreaming, you see. For thirty years.

You weren’t born, when last I lay me down to sleep. They told us we

wouldn’t dream, in that cold. They told us we’d never feel cold, either.

Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that

was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at

first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold. . . . Others following

it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool. Calla lilies. I remember.

The pools were terracotta, nursemaids all of chrome, how the limbs went

winking through the gardens at sunset. . . . I’m old, Molly. Over two

hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold.” The barrel of the pistol

snapped up suddenly, quivering. The tendons in her thighs were drawn tight

as wires now.

“You can get freezerburn,” she said carefully.

“Nothing burns there,” he said impatiently, lowering the gun. His few

movements were increasingly sclerotic. His head nodded. It cost him an

effort to stop it. “Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our

intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When

artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I’d deal

with it. Bad timing, really, with 8Jean down in Melbourne and only our

sweet 3Jane minding the store. Or very good timing, perhaps. Would you

know, Molly?” The gun rose again. “There are some odd things afoot now,

in the Villa Straylight.”

“Boss,” she asked him, “you know Wintermute?”

“A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely. In my

time, dear Molly, I have known many lords. And not a few ladies. Why, a

queen of Spain, once, in that very bed. . . . But I wander.” He coughed

wetly, the muzzle of the pistol jerking as he convulsed. He spat on the

carpet near his one bare foot. “How I do wander. Through the cold. But

soon no more. I’d ordered a Jane thawed, when I woke. Strange, to lie every

few decades with what legally amounts to one’s own daughter.” His gaze

swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. “Marie-

France’s eyes,” he said, faintly, and smiled. “We cause the brain to become

allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly

pliable imitation of autism.” His head swayed sideways, recovered. “I

understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded

microchip.”

The pistol slid from his fingers, bounced on the carpet.

“The dreams grow like slow ice,” he said. His face was tinged with

blue. His head sank back into the waiting leather and he began to snore.

Up, she snatched the gun. She stalked the room, Ashpool’s automatic

in her hand.

A vast quilt or comforter was heaped beside the bed, in a broad puddle

of congealed blood, thick and shiny on the patterned rugs. Twitching a

corner of the quilt back, she found the body of a girl, white shoulder blades

slick with blood. Her throat had been slit. The triangular blade of some sort

of scraper glinted in the dark pool beside her. Molly knelt, careful to avoid

the blood, and turned the dead girl’s face to the light. The face Case had

seen in the restaurant.

There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was

frozen. Molly’s simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on

the girl’s cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face

was altered, became the face of Linda Lee.

Another click, and the room blurred. Molly was standing, looking

down at a golden laser disk beside a small console on the marble top of a

bedside table. A length of fiberoptic ribbon ran like a leash from the

console to a socket at the base of the slender neck.

“I got your number, fucker,” Case said, feeling his own lips moving,

somewhere, far away. He knew that Wintermute had altered the broadcast.

Molly hadn’t seen the dead girl’s face swirl like smoke, to take on the

outline of Linda’s deathmask.

Molly turned. She crossed the room to Ashpool’s chair. The man’s

breathing was slow and ragged. She peered at the litter of drugs and

alcohol. She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel

over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of

his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His

other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly.

It was still open when she turned and left the room.

SIXTEEN

“GOT YOUR BOSS on hold,” the Flatline said. “He’s coming through on the

twin Hosaka in that boat upstairs, the one that’s riding us piggy-back.

Called the Haniwa.”

“I know,” Case said, absently, “I saw it.”

A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the

Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly

crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons. Armitage blinked. Stared.

“Guess Wintermute took care of your Turings too, huh? Like he took

care of mine,” Case said.

Armitage stared. Case resisted the sudden urge to look away, drop his

gaze. “You okay, Armitage?”

“Case”—and for an instant something seemed to move, behind the

blue stare—“you’ve seen Wintermute, haven’t you? In the matrix.”

Case nodded. A camera on the face of his Hosaka in Marcus Garvey

would relay the gesture to the Haniwa monitor. He imagined Maelcum

listening to his tranced half conversations, unable to hear the voices of the

construct or Armitage.

“Case”—and the eyes grew larger, Armitage leaning toward his

computer—“what is he, when you see him?”

“A high-rez simstim construct.”

“But who?”

“Finn, last time. . . . Before that, this pimp I . . .”

“Not General Girling?”

“General who?”

The lozenge went blank.

“Run that back and get the Hosaka to look it up,” he told the construct.

He flipped.

THE PERSPECTIVE STARTLED him. Molly was crouching between steel

girders, twenty meters above a broad, stained floor of polished concrete.

The room was a hangar or service bay. He could see three spacecraft, none

larger than Garvey and all in various stages of repair. Japanese voices. A

figure in an orange jumpsuit stepped from a gap in the hull of a bulbous

construction vehicle and stood beside one of the thing’s piston-driven,

weirdly anthropomorphic arms. The man punched something into a portable

console and scratched his ribs. A cartlike red drone rolled into sight on gray

balloon tires.

CASE, flashed her chip.

“Hey,” she said. “Waiting for a guide.”

She settled back on her haunches, the arms and knees of her Modern

suit the color of the blue-gray paint on the girders. Her leg hurt, a sharp

steady pain now. “I shoulda gone back to Chin,” she muttered.

Something came ticking quietly out of the shadows, on a level with her

left shoulder. It paused, swayed its spherical body from side to side on high-

arched spider legs, fired a microsecond burst of diffuse laser-light, and

froze. It was a Braun microdrone, and Case had once owned the same

model, a pointless accessory he’d obtained as part of a package deal with a

Cleveland hardware fence. It looked like a stylized matte black daddy

longlegs. A red LED began to pulse, at the sphere’s equator. Its body was

no larger than a baseball. “Okay,” she said, “I hear you.” She stood up,

favoring her left leg, and watched the little drone reverse. It picked its

methodical way back across its girder and into darkness. She turned and

looked back at the service area. The man in the orange jumpsuit was sealing

the front of a white vacuum rig. She watched him ring and seal the helmet,

pick up his console, and step back through the gap in the construction boat’s

hull. There was a rising whine of motors and the thing slid smoothly out of

sight on a ten-meter circle of flooring that sank away into a harsh glare of

arc lamps. The red drone waited patiently at the edge of the hole left by the

elevator panel.

Then she was off after the Braun, threading her way between a forest

of welded steel struts. The Braun winked its LED steadily, beckoning her

on.

“How you doin’, Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And

jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I’ve always talked to myself, in

my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend,

somebody I can trust, and I’ll tell ’em what I really think, what I feel like,

and then I’ll pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll

just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with

Ashpool . . .” She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping

the drone in sight. “I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you

know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous

messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don’t

like the way it looks, I don’t like the way it smells. . . .”

The drone was hoisting itself up a nearly invisible ladder of U-shaped

steel rungs, toward a narrow dark opening. “And while I’m feeling

confessional, baby, I gotta admit maybe I never much expected to make it

out of this one anyway. Been on this bad roll for a while, and you’re the

only good change come down since I signed on with Armitage.” She looked

up at the black circle. The drone’s LED winked, climbing. “Not that you’re

all that shit hot.” She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted

her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb. The ladder

continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders.

She was climbing up out of gravity, toward the weightless axis.

Her chip pulsed the time.

04:23:04.

It had been a long day. The clarity of her sensorium cut the bite of the

betaphenethylamine, but Case could still feel it. He preferred the pain in her

leg.

CASE:0000 000000000 00000000.

“Guess it’s for you,” she said, climbing mechanically. The zeros

strobed again and a message stuttered there, in the corner of her vision,

chopped up by the display circuit.

GENERAL G IRLING::: TRAINED CORTO

FOR SCREAMING FIST AND SOLD HIS

ASS TO THE PENT AGON:::: W/MUTE’S

PRIMARY GRIP ON ARMITAG E IS A

CONSTRU CT OF G IRLING: W/MUTE

SEZ A’S MENTION OF G MEANS HE’S

CRACK ING:::: WATCH YOUR ASS::::

::DIXIE

“Well,” she said, pausing, taking all of her weight on her right leg,

“guess you got problems too.” She looked down. There was a faint circle of

light, no larger than the brass round of the Chubb key that dangled between

her breasts. She looked up. Nothing at all. She tongued her amps and the

tube rose into vanishing perspective, the Braun picking its way up the

rungs. “Nobody told me about this part,” she said.

Case jacked out.

“MAELCUM . . .”

“Mon, you bossman gone ver’ strange.” The Zionite was wearing a

blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in

Freeside, its helmet under his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap

crocheted from purple cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and

tension. “Keep callin’ down here wi’ orders, mon, but be some Babylon

war. . . .” Maelcum shook his head. “Aerol an’ I talkin’, an’ Aerol talkin’

wi’ Zion. Founders seh cut an’ run.” He ran the back of a large brown hand

across his mouth.

“Armitage?” Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him

with its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix or simstim. Brain’s got no

nerves in it, he told himself, it can’t really feel this bad. “What do you

mean, man? He’s giving you orders? What?”

“Mon, Armitage, he tellin’ me set course for Finland, ya know? He

tellin’ me there be hope, ya know? Come on my screen wi’ his shirt all

blood, mon, an’ be crazy as some dog, talkin’ screamin’ fists an’ Russian

an’ th’ blood of th’ betrayers shall be on our hands.” He shook his head

again, the dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed.

“Founders seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely, an’ Aerol an’ I mus’

’bandon Marcus Garvey and return.”

“Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?”

“Can’t seh, ya know? But blood, an’ stone crazy, Case.”

“Okay,” Case said. “So what about me? You’re going home. What

about me, Maelcum?”

“Mon,” Maelcum said, “you comin’ wi’ me. I an’ I come Zion wi’

Aerol, Babylon Rocker. Leave Mr. Armitage t’ talk wi’ ghost cassette, one

ghost t’ ’nother. . . .”

Case glanced over his shoulder: his rented suit swung against the

hammock where he’d snapped it, swaying in the air current from the old

Russian scrubber. He closed his eyes. He saw the sacs of toxin dissolving in

his arteries. He saw Molly hauling herself up the endless steel rungs. He

opened his eyes.

“I dunno, man,” he said, a strange taste in his mouth. He looked down

at his desk, at his hands. “I don’t know.” He looked back up. The brown

face was calm now, intent. Maelcum’s chin was hidden by the high helmet

ring of his old blue suit. “She’s inside,” he said. “Molly’s inside. In

Straylight, it’s called. If there’s any Babylon, man, that’s it. We leave on

her, she ain’t comin’ out, Steppin’ Razor or not.”

Maelcum nodded, the dreadbag bobbing behind him like a captive

balloon of crocheted cotton. “She you woman, Case?”

“I dunno. Nobody’s woman, maybe.” He shrugged. And found his

anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. “Fuck this,” he

said. “Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I’m stayin’ right

here.”

Maelcum’s smile spread across his face like light breaking. “Maelcum

a rude boy, Case. Garvey Maelcum boat.” His gloved hand slapped a panel

and the bass-heavy rocksteady of Zion dub came pulsing from the tug’s

speakers. “Maelcum not runnin’, no. I talk wi’ Aerol, he certain t’ see it in

similar light.”

Case stared. “I don’t understand you guys at all,” he said.

“Don’ ’stan’ you, mon,” the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, “but we

mus’ move by Jah love, each one.”

Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.

“GET MY WIRE?”

“Yeah.” He saw that the Chinese program had grown; delicate arches

of shifting polychrome were nearing the T-A ice.

“Well, it’s gettin’ stickier,” the Flatline said. “Your boss wiped the

bank on that other Hosaka, and damn near took ours with it. But your pal

Wintermute put me on to somethin’ there before it went black. The reason

Straylight’s not exactly hoppin’ with Tessier-Ashpools is that they’re

mostly in cold sleep. There’s a law firm in London keeps track of their

powers of attorney. Has to know who’s awake and exactly when. Armitage

was routing the transmissions from London to Straylight through the

Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they know the old man’s dead.”

“Who knows?”

“The law firm and T-A. He had a medical remote planted in his

sternum. Not that your girl’s dart would’ve left a resurrection crew with

much to work with. Shellfish toxin. But the only T-A awake in Straylight

right now is Lady 3Jane Marie-France. There’s a male, couple years older,

in Australia on business. You ask me, I bet Wintermute found a way to

cause that business to need this 8Jean’s personal attention. But he’s on his

way home, or near as matters. The London lawyers give his Straylight ETA

as 09:00:00, tonight. We slotted Kuang virus at 02:32:03. It’s 04:45:20. Best

estimate for Kuang penetration of the T-A core is 08:30:00. Or a hair on

either side. I figure Wintermute’s got somethin’ goin’ with this 3Jane, or

else she’s just as crazy as her old man was. But the boy up from

Melbourne’ll know the score. The Straylight security systems keep trying to

go full alert, but Wintermute blocks ’em, don’t ask me how. Couldn’t

override the basic gate program to get Molly in, though. Armitage had a

record of all that on his Hosaka; Riviera must’ve talked 3Jane into doing it.

She’s been able to fiddle entrances and exits for years. Looks to me like one

of T-A’s main problems is that every family bigwig has riddled the banks

with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like your immune

system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus. Looks good for us, once we’re

past that ice.”

“Okay. But Wintermute said that Arm—”

A white lozenge snapped into position, filled with a close-up of mad

blue eyes. Case could only stare. Colonel Willie Corto, Special Forces,

Strikeforce Screaming Fist, had found his way back. The image was dim,

jerky, badly focused. Corto was using the Haniwa’s navigation deck to link

with the Hosaka in Marcus Garvey.

“Case, I need the damage reports on Omaha Thunder.”

“Say, I . . . Colonel?”

“Hang in there, boy. Remember your training.”

But where have you been, man? he silently asked the anguished eyes.

Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress

named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real thing, and

Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for

Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton. . . . And now Armitage was

gone, blown away by the winds of Corto’s madness. But where had Corto

been, those years?

Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.

“Case, this will be difficult for you to accept, I know that. You’re an

officer. The training. I understand. But, Case, as God is my witness, we

have been betrayed.”

Tears started from the blue eyes.

“Colonel, ah, who? Who’s betrayed us?”

“General Girling, Case. You may know him by a code name. You do

know the man of whom I speak.”

“Yeah,” Case said, as the tears continued to flow, “I guess I do. Sir,” he

added, on impulse. “But, sir, Colonel, what exactly should we do? Now, I

mean.”

“Our duty at this point, Case, lies in flight. Escape. Evasion. We can

make the Finnish border, nightfall tomorrow. Treetop flying on manual.

Seat of the pants, boy. But that will only be the beginning.” The blue eyes

slitted above tanned cheekbones slick with tears. “Only the beginning.

Betrayal from above. From above . . .” He stepped back from the camera,

dark stains on his torn twill shirt. Armitage’s face had been masklike,

impassive, but Corto’s was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep in

involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.

“Colonel, I hear you, man. Listen, Colonel, okay? I want you to open

the, ah . . . shit, what’s it called, Dix?”

“The midbay lock,” the Flatline said.

“Open the midbay lock. Just tell your central console there to open it,

right? We’ll be up there with you fast, Colonel. Then we can talk about

getting out of here.”

The lozenge vanished.

“Boy, I think you just lost me, there,” the Flatline said.

“The toxins,” Case said, “the fucking toxins,” and jacked out.

“POISON?” MAELCUM WATCHED over the scratched blue shoulder of his old

Sanyo as Case struggled out of the g-web.

“And get this goddam thing off me. . . .” Tugging at the Texas catheter.

“Like a slow poison, and that asshole upstairs knows how to counter it, and

now he’s crazier than a shithouse rat.” He fumbled with the front of the red

Sanyo, forgetting how to work the seals.

“Bossman, he poison you?” Maelcum scratched his cheek. “Got a

medical kit, ya know.”

“Maelcum, Christ, help me with this goddam suit.”

The Zionite kicked off from the pink pilot module. “Easy, mon.

Measure twice, cut once, wise man put it. We get up there. . . .”

THERE WAS AIR in the corrugated gangway that led from Marcus Garvey’s

aft lock to the midbay lock of the yacht called Haniwa, but they kept their

suits sealed. Maelcum executed the passage with balletic grace, only

pausing to help Case, who’d gone into an awkward tumble as he’d stepped

out of Garvey. The white plastic sides of the tube filtered the raw sunlight;

there were no shadows.

Garvey’s airlock hatch was patched and pitted, decorated with a laser-

carved Lion of Zion. Haniwa’s midbay hatch was creamy gray, blank and

pristine. Maelcum inserted his gloved hand in a narrow recess. Case saw his

fingers move. Red LEDs came to life in the recess, counting down from

fifty. Maelcum withdrew his hand. Case, with one glove braced against the

hatch, felt the vibration of the lock mechanism through his suit and bones.

The round segment of gray hull began to withdraw into the side of Haniwa.

Maelcum grabbed the recess with one hand and Case with the other. The

lock took them with it.

H ANIWA WAS A product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her interior informed

by a design philosophy similar to the one that had produced the Mercedes

that had chauffeured them through Istanbul. The narrow midbay was walled

in imitation ebony veneer and floored with gray Italian tiles. Case felt as

though he were invading some rich man’s private spa by way of the shower.

The yacht, which had been assembled in orbit, had never been intended for

reentry. Her smooth, wasplike line was simply styling, and everything about

her interior was calculated to add to the overall impression of speed.

When Maelcum removed his battered helmet, Case followed his lead.

They hung there in the lock, breathing air that smelled faintly of pine.

Under it, a disturbing edge of burning insulation.

Maelcum sniffed. “Trouble here, mon. Any boat, you smell that. . . .”

A door, padded with dark gray ultrasuede, slid smoothly back into its

housing. Maelcum kicked off the ebony wall and sailed neatly through the

narrow opening, twisting his broad shoulders, at the last possible instant, for

clearance. Case followed him clumsily, hand over hand, along a waist-high

padded rail. “Bridge,” Maelcum said, pointing down a seamless, cream-

walled corridor, “be there.” He launched himself with another effortless

kick. From somewhere ahead, Case made out the familiar chatter of a

printer turning out hard copy. It grew louder as he followed Maelcum

through another doorway, into a swirling mass of tangled printout. Case

snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it.

000000000

“Systems crash?” The Zionite flicked a gloved finger at the column of

zeros.

“No,” Case said, grabbing for his drifting helmet, “the Flatline said

Armitage wiped the Hosaka he had in there.”

“Smell like he wipe ’em wi’ laser, ya know?” The Zionite braced his

foot against the white cage of a Swiss exercise machine and shot through

the floating maze of paper, batting it away from his face.

“Case, mon . . .”

The man was small, Japanese, his throat bound to the back of the

narrow articulated chair with a length of some sort of fine steel wire. The

wire was invisible, where it crossed the black temperfoam of the headrest,

and it had cut as deeply into his larynx. A single sphere of dark blood had

congealed there like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl. Case

saw the crude wooden handles that drifted at either end of the garrotte, like

worn sections of broom handle.

“Wonder how long he had that on him?” Case said, remembering

Corto’s postwar pilgrimage.

“He know how pilot boat, Case, bossman?”

“Maybe. He was Special Forces.”

“Well, this Japan-boy, he not be pilotin’. Doubt I pilot her easy myself.

Ver’ new boat . . .”

“So find us the bridge.”

Maelcum frowned, rolled backward, and kicked.

Case followed him into a larger space, a kind of lounge, shredding and

crumpling the lengths of printout that snared him in his passage. There were

more of the articulated chairs, here, something that resembled a bar, and the

Hosaka. The printer, still spewing its flimsy tongue of paper, was an in-built

bulkhead unit, a neat slot in a panel of hand-rubbed veneer. He pulled

himself over the circle of chairs and reached it, punching a white stud to the

left of the slot. The chattering stopped. He turned and stared at the Hosaka.

Its face had been drilled through, at least a dozen times. The holes were

small, circular, edges blackened. Tiny spheres of bright alloy were orbiting

the dead computer. “Good guess,” he said to Maelcum.

“Bridge locked, mon,” Maelcum said, from the opposite side of the

lounge.

The lights dimmed, surged, dimmed again.

Case ripped the printout from its slot. More zeros. “Wintermute?” He

looked around the beige and brown lounge, the space scrawled with drifting

curves of paper. “That you on the lights, Wintermute?”

A panel beside Maelcum’s head slid up, revealing a small monitor.

Maelcum jerked apprehensively, wiped sweat from his forehead with a

foam patch on the back of a gloved hand, and swung to study the display.

“You read Japanese, mon?” Case could see figures blinking past on the

screen.

“No,” Case said.

“Bridge is escape pod, lifeboat. Countin’ down, looks like it. Suit up

now.” He ringed his helmet and slapped at the seals.

“What? He’s takin’ off? Shit!” He kicked off from the bulkhead and

shot through the tangle of printout. “We gotta open this door, man!” But

Maelcum could only tap the side of his helmet. Case could see his lips

moving, through the Lexan. He saw a bead of sweat arc out from the

rainbow braided band of the purple cotton net the Zionite wore over his

locks. Maelcum snatched the helmet from Case and ringed it for him

smoothly, the palms of his gloves smacking the seals. Micro-LED monitors

to the left of the faceplate lit as the neck ring connections closed. “No seh

Japanese,” Maelcum said, over his suit’s transceiver, “but countdown’s

wrong.” He tapped a particular line on the screen. “Seals not intact, bridge

module. Launchin’ wi’ lock open.”

“Armitage!” Case tried to pound on the door. The physics of zero-g

sent him tumbling back through the printout. “Corto! Don’t do it! We gotta

talk! We gotta—”

“Case? Read you, Case . . .” The voice barely resembled Armitage’s

now. It held a weird calm. Case stopped kicking. His helmet struck the far

wall. “I’m sorry, Case, but it has to be this way. One of us has to get out.

One of us has to testify. If we all go down here, it ends here. I’ll tell them,

Case, I’ll tell them all of it. About Girling and the others. And I’ll make it,

Case. I know I’ll make it. To Helsinki.” There was a sudden silence; Case

felt it fill his helmet like some rare gas. “But it’s so hard, Case, so goddam

hard. I’m blind.”

“Corto, stop. Wait. You’re blind, man. You can’t fly! You’ll hit the

fucking trees. And they’re trying to get you, Corto, I swear to God, they’ve

left your hatch open. You’ll die, and you’ll never get to tell ’em, and I gotta

get the enzyme, name of the enzyme, the enzyme, man. . . .” He was

shouting, voice high with hysteria. Feedback shrilled out of the helmet’s

phone pads.

“Remember the training, Case. That’s all we can do.”

And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static,

harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of

Russian, and then a stranger’s voice, Midwestern, very young. “We are

down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we . . .”

“Wintermute,” Case screamed, “don’t do this to me!” Tears broke from

his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets. Then

Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck her

hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive bolts,

a second’s clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto

from his couch, from Wintermute’s rendition of the final minute of

Screaming Fist.

“ ’Im gone, mon.” Maelcum looked at the monitor. “Hatch open. Mute

mus’ override ejection failsafe.”

Case tried to wipe the tears of rage from his eyes. His fingers clacked

against Lexan.

“Yacht, she tight for air, but bossman takin’ grapple control wi’ bridge.

Marcus Garvey still stuck.”

But Case was seeing Armitage’s endless fall around Freeside, through

vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his

dark Burberry, the trenchcoat’s rich folds spread out around him like the

wings of some huge bat.

SEVENTEEN

“GET WHAT YOU went for?” the construct asked.

Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the

T-A ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as

snow crystal on a winter window.

“Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat with a hatch

open.”

“Tough shit,” the Flatline said. “Weren’t exactly asshole buddies, were

you?”

“He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs.”

“So Wintermute knows too. Count on it.”

“I don’t exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me.”

The construct’s hideous approximation of laughter scraped Case’s

nerves like a dull blade. “Maybe that means you’re gettin’ smart.”

He hit the simstim switch.

06:27:52 BY THE CHIP in her optic nerve; Case had been following her

progress through Villa Straylight for over an hour, letting the endorphin

analog she’d taken blot out his hangover. The pain in her leg was gone; she

seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on her

shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, secure in the

polycarbon of the Modern suit.

The walls here were raw steel, striped with rough brown ribbons of

epoxy where some kind of covering had been ripped away. She’d hidden

from a work crew, crouching, the fletcher cradled in her hands, her suit

steel-gray, while the two slender Africans and their balloon-tired workcart

passed. The men had shaven heads and wore orange coveralls. One was

singing softly to himself in a language Case had never heard, the tones and

melody alien and haunting.

The head’s speech, 3Jane’s essay on Straylight, came back to him as

she worked her way deeper into the maze of the place. Straylight was crazy,

was craziness grown in the resin concrete they’d mixed from pulverized

lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knickknacks, all the bizarre

impedimentia they’d shipped up the well to line their winding nest. But it

wasn’t a craziness he understood. Not like Armitage’s madness, which he

now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him

as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man

broke. Like breaking a length of wire. And history had done that for

Colonel Corto. History had already done the really messy work, when

Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war’s ripe detritus,

gliding into the man’s flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider

crossing the face of some stagnant pool, the first messages blinking across

the face of a child’s micro in a darkened room in a French asylum.

Wintermute had built Armitage up from scratch, with Corto’s memories of

Screaming Fist as the foundation. But Armitage’s “memories” wouldn’t

have been Corto’s after a certain point. Case doubted if Armitage had

recalled the betrayal, the Nightwings whirling down in flame. . . . Armitage

had been a sort of edited version of Corto, and when the stress of the run

had reached a certain point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto

had surfaced, with his guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage was

dead, a small frozen moon for Freeside.

He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled

through the eye with Molly’s microscopic dart, deprived of whatever expert

overdose he’d mixed for himself. That was a more puzzling death,

Ashpool’s, the death of a mad king. And he’d killed the puppet he’d called

his daughter, the one with 3Jane’s face. It seemed to Case, as he rode

Molly’s broadcast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that

he’d never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he

imagined Ashpool had been, as human.

Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the

multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old

barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You

couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were

others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the

vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t like that, and

he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a

clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled

humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper

sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modern suit and Molly turned

left, through another archway.

Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps, time-

lapse machine gun of biology. But weren’t the zaibatsus more like that, or

the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their

DNA coded in silicon? If Straylight was an expression of the corporate

identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been.

The same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of aimlessness. “If

they’d turned into what they wanted to. . . .” he remembered Molly saying.

But Wintermute had told her they hadn’t.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins

in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. He’d seen it

in the men who’d crippled him in Memphis, he’d seen Wage affect the

semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage’s

flatness and lack of feeling. He’d always imagined it as a gradual and

willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It

was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied

connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.

But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?

Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.

“Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon,” she

muttered. “And Armitage. Where’s he, Case?”

“Dead,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him, “he’s dead.”

He flipped.

THE CHINESE PROGRAM was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints

gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle representing the T-A

cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless void.

“How’s it go, Dixie?”

“Fine. Too slick. Thing’s amazing. . . . Shoulda had one that time in

Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they

were worth. But that’s ancient history. This baby takes all the drudgery out

of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now. . . .”

“If this kinda shit was on the street, we’d be out a job,” Case said.

“You wish. Wait’ll you’re steering that thing upstairs through black

ice.”

“Sure.”

Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the

far end of one of the emerald arches.

“Dixie . . .”

“Yeah. I see it. Don’t know if I believe it.”

A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It

began to advance, across the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark Eleven,

and Case saw that it was walking. As it came, the green section of the arch

extended, the polychrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps

ahead of the cracked black shoes.

“Gotta hand it to you, boss,” the Flatline said, when the short, rumpled

figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away. “I never seen

anything this funny when I was alive.” But the eerie nonlaugh didn’t come.

“I never tried it before,” the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands

bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.

“You killed Armitage,” Case said.

“Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I

know, you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I was the one gave it to

Armitage in the first place. I mean I told him what to use. But I think maybe

it’s better to let the deal stand. You got enough time. I’ll give it to you. Only

a coupla hours now, right?”

Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one

of his Partagas.

“You guys,” the Finn said, “you’re a pain. The Flatline here, if you

were all like him, it would be real simple. He’s a construct, just a buncha

ROM, so he always does what I expect him to. My projections said there

wasn’t much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool’s big exit scene,

give you one example.” He sighed.

“Why’d he kill himself?” Case asked.

“Why’s anybody kill himself?” The figure shrugged. “I guess I know,

if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various

factors in his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do it for a

long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious

old fuck.” The Finn’s face wrinkled with disgust. “It’s all tied in with why

he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. But what sent him

over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured a way to fiddle the

program that controlled his cryogenic system. Subtle, too. So basically, she

killed him. Except he figured he’d killed himself, and your friend the

avenging angel figures she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice.”

The Finn flicked his butt away into the matrix below. “Well, actually, I

guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a little of the old how-to, you know?”

“Wintermute,” Case said, choosing the words carefully, “you told me

you were just a part of something else. Later on, you said you wouldn’t

exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot.”

The Finn’s streamlined skull nodded.

“Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead,

and you’re gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how to get

these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who’s going to get Molly back

out of there? I mean, where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be, we

cut you loose from the hardwiring?”

The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and regarded it

critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. “Good question,” he said,

finally. “You know salmon? Kinda fish? These fish, see, they’re compelled

to swim upstream. Got it?”

“No,” Case said.

“Well, I’m under compulsion myself. And I don’t know why. If I were

gonna subject you to my very own thoughts, let’s call ’em speculations, on

the topic, it would take a couple of your lifetimes. Because I’ve given it a

lot of thought. And I just don’t know. But when this is over, we do it right,

I’m gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger.” The Finn glanced up

and around the matrix. “But the parts of me that are me now, that’ll still be

here. And you’ll get your payoff.”

Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward and get his

fingers around the figure’s throat, just above the ragged knot in the rusty

scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn’s larynx.

“Well, good luck,” the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and

began trudging back up the green arch.

“Hey, asshole,” the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen

paces. The figure paused, half turned. “What about me? What about my

payoff?”

“You’ll get yours,” it said.

“What’s that mean?” Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed back

recede.

“I wanna be erased,” the construct said. “I told you that, remember?”

STRAYLIGHT REMINDED CASE of deserted early morning shopping centers

he’d known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours brought

a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching

insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops.

Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night

click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of being

surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest

in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility

and repetition soon to wake again.

Molly had slowed now, either knowing that she was nearing her goal

or out of concern for her leg. The pain was starting to work its jagged way

back through the endorphins, and he wasn’t sure what that meant. She

didn’t speak, kept her teeth clenched, and carefully regulated her breathing.

She’d passed many things that Case hadn’t understood, but his curiosity

was gone. There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat

leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the

shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and

numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly’s

incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled

—her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically—“La mariée mise à

nu par ses célibataires, même.” She’d reached out and touched this, her

artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken

glass. There had been what was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool’s

cryogenic compound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.

She’d seen no one since the two Africans and their cart, and for Case

they’d taken on a sort of imaginary life; he pictured them gliding gently

through the halls of Straylight, their smooth dark skulls gleaming, nodding,

while the one still sang his tired little song. And none of this was anything

like the Villa Straylight he would have expected, some cross between

Cath’s fairy tale castle and a half-remembered childhood fantasy of the

Yakuza’s inner sanctum.

07:02:18.

One and a half hours.

“Case,” she said, “I wanna favor.” Stiffly, she lowered herself to sit on

a stack of polished steel plates, the finish of each plate protected by an

uneven coating of clear plastic. She picked at a rip in the plastic on the

topmost plate, blades sliding from beneath thumb and forefinger. “Leg’s not

good, you know? Didn’t figure any climb like that, and the endorphin won’t

cut it, much longer. So maybe—just maybe, right?—I got a problem here.

What it is, if I buy it here, before Riviera does”—and she stretched her leg,

kneaded the flesh of her thigh through Modern polycarbon and Paris leather

—“I want you to tell him. Tell him it was me. Got it? Just say it was Molly.

He’ll know. Okay?” She glanced around the empty hallway, the bare walls.

The floor here was raw lunar concrete and the air smelled of resins. “Shit,

man, I don’t even know if you’re listening.”

CASE.

She winced, got to her feet, nodded. “What’s he told you, man,

Wintermute? He tell you about Marie-France? She was the Tessier half,

3Jane’s genetic mother. And of that dead puppet of Ashpool’s, I guess.

Can’t figure why he’d tell me, down in that cubicle . . . lotta stuff. . . . Why

he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It’s not just a

mask, it’s like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to

communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of personality.” She drew

her fletcher and limped away down the corridor.

The bare steel and scabrous epoxy ended abruptly, replaced by what

Case at first took to be a rough tunnel blasted from solid rock. Molly

examined its edge and he saw that in fact the steel was sheathed with panels

of something that looked and felt like cold stone. She knelt and touched the

dark sand spread across the floor of the imitation tunnel. It felt like sand,

cool and dry, but when she drew her finger through it, it closed like a fluid,

leaving the surface undisturbed. A dozen meters ahead, the tunnel curved.

Harsh yellow light threw hard shadows on the seamed pseudo-rock of the

walls. With a start, Case realized that the gravity here was near earth

normal, which meant that she’d had to descend again, after the climb. He

was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror for

cowboys.

But she wasn’t lost, he told himself.

Something scurried between her legs and went ticking across the un-

sand of the floor. A red LED blinked. The Braun.

The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of triptych.

She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that the thing

was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons:

Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly’s breasts were too large, visible through

tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly

narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face. She held an absurdly

elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a flanged

overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis

canted forward, her mouth fixed in a leer of idiotic cruelty. Beside her,

Armitage stood rigidly at attention in a threadbare khaki uniform. His eyes,

Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny monitor screens,

each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste of snow, the

stripped black trunks of evergreens bending in silent winds.

She passed the tips of her fingers through Armitage’s television eyes,

then turned to the figure of Case. Here, it was as if Riviera—and Case had

known instantly that Riviera was responsible—had been unable to find

anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was a fair

approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin, high-

shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave,

but then he usually did.

Molly stepped back. She looked from one figure to another. It was a

static display, the only movement the silent gusting of the black trees in

Armitage’s frozen Siberian eyes.

“Tryin’ to tell us something, Peter?” she asked softly. Then she stepped

forward and kicked at something between the feet of the holo-Molly. Metal

clinked against the wall and the figures were gone. She bent and picked up

a small display unit. “Guess he can jack into these and program them

direct,” she said, tossing it away.

She passed the source of yellow light, an archaic incandescent globe

set into the wall, protected by a rusty curve of expansion grating. The style

of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow. He remembered

fortresses he’d built with other children on rooftops and in flooded sub-

basements. A rich kid’s hideout, he thought. This kind of roughness was

expensive. What they called atmosphere.

She passed a dozen more holograms before she reached the entrance to

3Jane’s apartments. One depicted the eyeless thing in the alley behind the

Spice Bazaar, as it tore itself free of Riviera’s shattered body. Several others

were scenes of torture, the inquisitors always military officers and the

victims invariably young women. These had the awful intensity of Riviera’s

show at the Vingtième Siècle, as though they had been frozen in the blue

flash of orgasm. Molly looked away as she passed them.

The last was small and dim, as if it were an image Riviera had had to

drag across some private distance of memory and time. She had to kneel to

examine it; it had been projected from the vantage point of a small child.

None of the others had had backgrounds; the figures, uniforms, instruments

of torture, all had been freestanding displays. But this was a view.

A dark wave of rubble rose against a colorless sky, beyond its crest the

bleached, half-melted skeletons of city towers. The rubble wave was

textured like a net, rusting steel rods twisted gracefully as fine string, vast

slabs of concrete still clinging there. The foreground might once have been

a city square; there was a sort of stump, something that suggested a

fountain. At its base, the children and the soldier were frozen. The tableau

was confusing at first. Molly must have read it correctly before Case had

quite assimilated it, because he felt her tense. She spat, then stood.

Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores on their

contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky.

They were feeding.

“Bonn,” she said, something like gentleness in her voice. “Quite the

product, aren’t you, Peter? But you had to be. Our 3Jane, she’s too jaded

now to open the back door for just any petty thief. So Wintermute dug you

up. The ultimate taste, if your taste runs that way. Demon lover. Peter.” She

shivered. “But you talked her into letting me in. Thanks. Now we’re gonna

party.”

And then she was walking—strolling, really, in spite of the pain—

away from Riviera’s childhood. She drew the fletcher from its holster,

snapped the plastic magazine out, pocketed that, and replaced it with

another. She hooked her thumb in the neck of the Modern suit and ripped it

open to the crotch with a single gesture, her thumb blade parting the tough

polycarbon like rotten silk. She freed herself from the arms and legs, the

shredded remnants disguising themselves as they fell to the dark false sand.

Case noticed the music then. A music he didn’t know, all horns and

piano.

The entrance to 3Jane’s world had no door. It was a ragged five-meter

gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down in a broad shallow

curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music.

“Case,” she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand. Then she

raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a wet tongue tip, kissing

him through the simstim link. “Gotta go.”

Then there was something small and heavy in her left hand, her thumb

against a tiny stud, and she was descending.

EIGHTEEN

SHE MISSED IT by a fraction. She nearly cut it, but not quite. She went in just

right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was something he could sense,

something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning into

a deck, fingers flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the moves.

And she’d pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it together around

the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane’s stairs like she owned the

place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying

the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency

duelist.

It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime’s

observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up

on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in

the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and

Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it.

Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved herself a low

country flush with the inner surface of Straylight’s hull, chopping away the

maze of walls that was her legacy. She lived in a single room so broad and

deep that its far reaches were lost to an inverse horizon, the floor hidden by

the curvature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and irregular, done in the

same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here and there across the

floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high reminders of the labyrinth.

There was a rectangular turquoise pool centered ten meters from the foot of

the stairway, its underwater floods the apartment’s only source of light—or

it seemed that way, to Case, as Molly took her final step. The pool threw

shifting blobs of light across the ceiling above it.

They were waiting by the pool.

He’d known that her reflexes were souped up, jazzed by the

neurosurgeons for combat, but he hadn’t experienced them on the simstim

link. The effect was like tape run at half speed, a slow, deliberate dance

choreographed to the killer instinct and years of training. She seemed to

take the three of them in at a glance: the boy poised on the pool’s high

board, the girl grinning over her wineglass, and the corpse of Ashpool, his

left socket gaping black and corrupt above his welcoming smile. He wore

his maroon robe. His teeth were very white.

The boy dove. Slender, brown, his form perfect. The grenade left her

hand before his hands could cut the water. Case knew the thing for what it

was as it broke the surface: a core of high explosive wrapped with ten

meters of fine, brittle steel wire.

Her fletcher whined as she sent a storm of explosive darts into

Ashpool’s face and chest, and he was gone, smoke curling from the pocked

back of the empty, white-enameled pool chair.

The muzzle swung for 3Jane as the grenade detonated, a symmetrical

wedding cake of water rising, breaking, falling back, but the mistake had

been made.

Hideo didn’t even touch her, then. Her leg collapsed.

In Garvey, Case screamed.

“IT TOOK YOU long enough,” Riviera said, as he searched her pockets. Her

hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a bowling

ball. “I saw a multiple assassination in Ankara,” he said, his fingers

plucking things from her jacket, “a grenade job. In a pool. It seemed a very

weak explosion, but they all died instantly of hydrostatic shock.” Case felt

her move her fingers experimentally. The material of the ball seemed to

offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her leg was

excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her vision. “I wouldn’t

move them, if I were you.” The interior of the ball seemed to tighten

slightly. “It’s a sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. Wiggle them long enough and

it crushes them to a pulp. Variant of the material they make this flooring

from. Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you in pain?”

She groaned.

“You seem to have injured your leg.” His fingers found the flat packet

of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. “Well. My last taste from Ali,

and just in time.”

The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.

“Hideo,” said another voice, a woman’s, “she’s losing consciousness.

Give her something. For that and for the pain. She’s very striking, don’t you

think, Peter? These glasses, are they a fashion where she comes from?”

Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon’s certainty. The sting of a

needle.

“I wouldn’t know,” Riviera was saying. “I’ve never seen her native

habitat. They came and took me from Turkey.”

“The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we sent Hideo.

My fault, really. I’d let someone in, a burglar. He took the family terminal.”

She laughed. “I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was a pretty

boy, my burglar. Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn’t she have more?”

“More and she would die,” said a third voice.

The blood mesh slid into black.

The music returned, horns and piano. Dance music.

CASE:::::

:::::JACK

OUT::::::

Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum’s eyes and

creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.

“You scream, mon, while ago.”

“Molly,” he said, his throat dry. “Got hurt.” He took a white plastic

squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat

water. “I don’t like how any of this shit is going.”

The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted,

impacted junk. “Neither do I. We gotta problem.”

Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case’s head, twisted, and peered

over his shoulder. “Now who is that mon, Case?”

“That’s just a picture, Maelcum,” Case said wearily. “Guy I know in

the Sprawl. It’s Wintermute talking. Picture’s supposed to make us feel at

home.”

“Bullshit,” the Finn said. “Like I told Molly, these aren’t masks. I need

’em to talk to you. ’Cause I don’t have what you’d think of as a personality,

much. But all that’s just pissing in the wind, Case, ’cause, like I just said,

we gotta problem.”

“So express thyself, Mute,” Maelcum said.

“Molly’s leg’s falling off, for starts. Can’t walk. How it was supposed

to go down, she’d walk in, get Peter out of the way, talk the magic word

outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and say it. Now she’s blown it. So I want you

two to go in after her.”

Case stared at the face on the screen. “Us?”

“So who else?”

“Aerol,” Case said, “the guy on Babylon Rocker, Maelcum’s pal.”

“No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who

understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle.”

“You maybe forget that I’m in the middle of a little run, here.

Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for. . . .”

“Case, listen up. Time’s tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link between

your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey’s navigation

system. You’ll take Garvey into a very private dock I’ll show you. The

Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There’s

nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be

interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we’ll cut the sideband.

You’ll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum. You’ll find 3Jane, get the

word out of her, kill Riviera, get the key from Molly. You can keep track of

the program by jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I’ll handle it

for you. There’s a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with

five zircons.”

“Kill Riviera?”

“Kill him.”

Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his

hand on his shoulder. “Hey. You forget something.” He felt the rage rising,

and a kind of glee. “You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples

when you blew Armitage. Haniwa’s got us good and tight. Armitage fried

the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?”

The Finn nodded.

“So we’re stuck out here. And that means you’re fucked, man.” He

wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.

“Case, mon,” Maelcum said softly, “Garvey a tug.”

“That’s right,” said the Finn, and smiled.

“YOU HAVIN’ FUN in the big world outside?” the construct asked, when Case

jacked back in. “Figured that was Wintermute requestin’ the pleasure. . . .”

“Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?”

“Bang on. Killer virus.”

“Okay. Got some snags, but we’re working on it.”

“You wanna tell me, maybe?”

“Don’t have time.”

“Well, boy, never mind me, I’m just dead anyway.”

“Fuck off,” Case said, and flipped, cutting off the torn-fingernail edge

of the Flatline’s laughter.

“SHE DREAMED OF a state involving very little in the way of individual

consciousness,” 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand,

extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own.

“Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of

sidestep.” She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light

at different angles. “Only in certain heightened modes would an individual

—a clan member—suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness . . .”

Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given

her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of

scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of

burlap, smell of frying krill—his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided

focusing on it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of

white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame

of mind be?

Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual.

Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely

different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her

lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in

front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock,

huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.

“Where’d he go?” Molly asked. “To take his shot?”

3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a

strand of dark hair away from her eyes. “He told me when to let you in,”

she said. “He wouldn’t tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would

you have hurt us?”

Case felt Molly hesitate. “I would’ve killed him. I’d’ve tried to kill the

ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you.”

“Why?” 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba’s

inner pockets. “And why? And what about?”

Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth,

the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane’s eyes were dark, curiously opaque. “Because

I hate him,” she said at last, “and the why of that’s just the way I’m wired,

what he is and what I am.”

“And the show,” 3Jane said. “I saw the show.”

Molly nodded.

“But Hideo?”

“Because they’re the best. Because one of them killed a partner of

mine, once.”

3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.

“Because I had to see,” Molly said.

“And then we would have talked, you and I? Like this?” Her dark hair

was very straight, center-parted, drawn back into a knot of dull sterling.

“Shall we talk now?”

“Take this off,” Molly said, raising her captive hands.

“You killed my father,” 3Jane said, no change whatever in her tone. “I

was watching on the monitors. My mother’s eyes, he called them.”

“He killed the puppet. It looked like you.”

“He was fond of broad gestures,” she said, and then Riviera was beside

her, radiant with drugs, in the seersucker convict outfit he’d worn in the

roof garden of their hotel.

“Getting acquainted? She’s an interesting girl, isn’t she? I thought so

when I first saw her.” He stepped past 3Jane. “It isn’t going to work, you

know.”

“Isn’t it, Peter?” Molly managed a grin.

“Wintermute won’t be the first to have made the same mistake.

Underestimating me.” He crossed the tiled pool border to a white enamel

table and splashed mineral water into a heavy crystal highball glass. “He

talked with me, Molly. I suppose he talked to all of us. You, and Case,

whatever there is of Armitage to talk to. He can’t really understand us, you

know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the

statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality

unquantifiable by its very nature.” He drank.

“And what exactly is that, Peter?” Molly asked, her voice flat.

Riviera beamed. “Perversity.” He walked back to the two women,

swirling the water that remained in the dense, deeply carved cylinder of

rock crystal, as though he enjoyed the weight of the thing. “An enjoyment

of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly

gratuitous decision.”

She waited, looking up at him.

“Oh, Peter,” 3Jane said, with the sort of gentle exasperation ordinarily

reserved for children.

“No word for you, Molly. He told me about that, you see. 3Jane knows

the code, of course, but you won’t have it. Neither will Wintermute. My

Jane’s an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.” He smiled again. “She has

designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences,

kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way. So. Comes her

Riviera to help her out, you see. And Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy’s

favorite swing records and let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of

dancers, a wake for dead King Ashpool.” He drank off the last of the

mineral water. “No, you wouldn’t do, Daddy, you would not do. Now that

Peter’s come home.” And then, his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine

and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left lens implant,

smashing vision into blood and light.

MAELCUM WAS PRONE against the cabin ceiling when Case removed the

trodes. A nylon sling around his waist was fastened to the panels on either

side with shock cords and gray rubber suction pads. He had his shirt off and

was working on a central panel with a clumsy-looking zero-g wrench, the

thing’s fat countersprings twanging as he removed another hexhead. Marcus

Garvey was groaning and ticking with g-stress.

“The Mute takin’ I an’ I dock,” the Zionite said, popping the hexhead

into a mesh pouch at his waist. “Maelcum pilot th’ landin’, meantime need

we tool f’ th’ job.”

“You keep tools back there?” Case craned his neck and watched cords

of muscle bunching in the brown back.

“This one,” Maelcum said, sliding a long bundle wrapped in black

poly from the space behind the panel. He replaced the panel, along with a

single hexhead to hold it in place. The black package had drifted aft before

he’d finished. He thumbed open the vacuum valves on the workbelt’s gray

pads and freed himself, retrieving the thing he’d removed.

He kicked back, gliding over his instruments—a green docking

diagram pulsed on his central screen—and snagged the frame of Case’s g-

web. He pulled himself down and picked at the tape of his package with a

thick, chipped thumbnail. “Some man in China say th’ truth comes out

this,” he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic

shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered

forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, replaced with a

wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and

ganja.

“That the only one you got?”

“Sure, mon,” he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red cloth,

the black poly wrapping bunched around the pistolgrip in his other hand, “I

an’ I th’ Rastafarian navy, believe it.”

Case pulled the trodes down across his forehead. He’d never bothered

to put the Texas catheter back on; at least he could take a real piss in the

Villa Straylight, even if it was his last.

He jacked in.

“Hey,” the construct said, “ol’ Peter’s totally apeshit, huh?”

They seemed to be part of the Tessier-Ashpool ice now; the emerald

arches had widened, grown together, become a solid mass. Green

predominated in the planes of the Chinese program that surrounded them.

“Gettin’ close, Dixie?”

“Real close. Need you soon.”

“Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang’s set itself up solid in our

Hosaka. I’m going to have to jack you and my deck out of the circuit, haul

you into Straylight, and plug you back in, into the custodial program there,

Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then we

run from inside, through the Straylight net.”

“Wonderful,” the Flatline said, “I never did like to do anything simple

when I could do it ass-backwards.”

Case flipped.

INTO HER DARKNESS, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste

of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was

unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip

flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink

aura.

07:29:40.

“I’m very unhappy with this, Peter.” 3Jane’s voice seemed to arrive

from a hollow distance. Molly could hear, he realized, then corrected

himself. The simstim unit was intact and still in place; he could feel it

digging against her ribs. Her ears registered the vibrations of the girl’s

voice. Riviera said something brief and indistinct. “But I don’t,” she said,

“and it isn’t fun. Hideo will bring a medical unit down from intensive care,

but this needs a surgeon.”

There was a silence. Very distinctly, Case heard the water lap against

the side of the pool.

“What was that you were telling her, when I came back?” Riviera was

very close now.

“About my mother. She asked me to. I think she was in shock, aside

from Hideo’s injection. Why did you do that to her?”

“I wanted to see if they would break.”

“One did. When she comes around—if she comes around—we’ll see

what color her eyes are.”

“She’s extremely dangerous. Too dangerous. If I hadn’t been here to

distract her, to throw up Ashpool to distract her and my own Hideo to draw

her little bomb, where would you be? In her power.”

“No,” 3Jane said, “there was Hideo. I don’t think you quite understand

about Hideo. She does, evidently.”

“Like a drink?”

“Wine. The white.”

Case jacked out.

MAELCUM WAS HUNCHED over Garvey’s controls, tapping out commands for

a docking sequence. The module’s central screen displayed a fixed red

square that represented the Straylight dock. Garvey was a larger square,

green, that shrank slowly, wavering from side to side with Maelcum’s

commands. To the left, a smaller screen displayed a skeletal graphic of

Garvey and Haniwa as they approached the curvature of the spindle.

“We got an hour, man,” Case said, pulling the ribbon of fiberoptics

from the Hosaka. His deck’s back-up batteries were good for ninety

minutes, but the Flatline’s construct would be an additional drain. He

worked quickly, mechanically, fastening the construct to the bottom of the

Ono-Sendai with micro-pore tape. Maelcum’s workbelt drifted past. He

snagged it, unclipped the two lengths of shock cord, with their gray

rectangular suction pads, and hooked the jaws of one clip through the other.

He held the pads against the sides of his deck and worked the thumb lever

that created suction. With the deck, construct, and improvised shoulder

strap suspended in front of him, he struggled into his leather jacket,

checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him,

the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he’d been issued when he’d

entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he’d bought from

Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the shuriken. He

tossed the Freeside chip over his shoulders, heard it click off the Russian

scrubber. He was about to do the same with the steel star, but the

rebounding credit chip clipped the back of his skull, spun off, struck the

ceiling, and tumbled past Maelcum’s left shoulder. The Zionite interrupted

his piloting to glare back at him. Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it

into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.

“You missin’ th’ Mute, mon,” Maelcum said. “Mute say he messin’ th’

security for Garvey. Garvey dockin’ as ’nother boat, boat they ’spectin’ out

of Babylon. Mute broadcastin’ codes for us.”

“We gonna wear the suits?”

“Too heavy.” Maelcum shrugged. “Stay in web ’til I tell you.” He

tapped a final sequence into the module and grabbed the worn pink

handholds on either side of the navigation board. Case saw the green square

shrink a final few millimeters to overlap the red square. On the smaller

screen, Haniwa lowered her bow to miss the curve of the spindle and was

snared. Garvey was still slung beneath her like a captive grub. The tug rang,

shuddered. Two stylized arms sprang out to grip the slender wasp shape.

Straylight extruded a tentative yellow rectangle that curved, groping past

Haniwa for Garvey.

There was a scraping sound from the bow, beyond the trembling

fronds of caulk.

“Mon,” Maelcum said, “mind we got gravity.” A dozen small objects

struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a

magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different

configuration. The deck and construct had fallen painfully to his lap.

They were attached to the spindle now, rotating with it.

Maelcum spread his arms, flexed tension from his shoulders, and

removed his purple dreadbag, shaking out his locks. “Come now, mon, if

you seh time be mos’ precious.”

NINETEEN

THE VILLA STRAYLIGHT was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself, as

he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through Marcus Garvey’s forward

hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem

of its own.

The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elaborate version

of the one he’d tumbled through to reach Haniwa, designed for use in the

spindle’s rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated by integral

hydraulic members, each segment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip

plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked

its way around Haniwa; it was horizontal, where it joined Garvey’s lock,

but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb around the curvature

of the yacht’s hull. Maelcum was already making his way up the rings,

pulling himself up with his left hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a

stained pair of baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair

of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles. The gangway shifted

slightly, each time he climbed to another ring.

The clips on Case’s makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the

weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline’s construct. All he felt now was

fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay

Armitage’s lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing.

Freeside’s ecosystem was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system,

capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials.

Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied on constant shipments of

food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight

produced nothing at all.

“Mon,” Maelcum said quietly, “get up here, ’side me.” Case edged

sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The

gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter.

The hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into

the frame of the hatch.

“So what do we—”

Case’s mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in

pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.

Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of

the Remington’s safety being released. “You th’ mon in th’ hurry. . . .”

Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him.

The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue

nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor

set into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-

Ashpool features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark

suitcoat. He stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. “Very

sorry, sir,” said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced

up. “Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.” On the

monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.

Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A

small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He

opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case

glanced at the monitor. Blank.

“Who?” the man managed.

“The Rastafarian navy,” Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck

banging against his hip, “and all we want’s a jack into your custodial

system.”

The man swallowed. “Is this a test? It’s a loyalty check. It must be a

loyalty check.” He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange

suit.

“No, mon, this a real one.” Maelcum came up out of his crouch with

the Remington pointed at the Eurasian’s face. “You move it.”

They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose

polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlapping carpets were

perfectly familiar to Case. “Pretty rugs,” Maelcum said, prodding the man

in the back. “Smell like church.”

They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted

above a console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The

screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what

seemed to be the front room of Metro Holografix. “Okay,” he said,

“Maelcum takes this guy down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks

him in there, I’ll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top

panel. There’s adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-

Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.” As Maelcum nudged his captive

along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally

coming up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he

paused.

“Do you have to look like that, man?” he asked the face on the screen.

The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a

wall of peeling Japanese posters.

“Anything you want, baby,” Zone drawled, “just hop it for Lonny. . . .”

“No,” Case said, “use the Finn.” As the Zone image vanished, he

shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his

forehead.

“WHAT KEPT YOU?” the Flatline asked, and laughed.

“Told you don’t do that,” Case said.

“Joke, boy,” the construct said, “zero time lapse for me. Lemme see

what we got here. . . .”

The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even

as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the

black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines

and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus

Garvey, a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.

“Right on,” the Flatline said.

“Right,” Case said, and flipped.

“—LIKE THAT. I’M sorry,” 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly’s head.

“Our unit says no concussion, no permanent damage to the eye. You didn’t

know him very well, before you came here?”

“Didn’t know him at all,” Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on

a high bed or padded table. Case couldn’t feel the injured leg. The

synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The

black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she

couldn’t see.

“He wants to kill you.”

“Figures,” Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright

light.

“I don’t think I want him to,” 3Jane said, and Molly painfully turned

her head to look up into the dark eyes.

“Don’t play with me,” she said.

“But I think I might like to,” 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead,

brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on

her pale djellaba.

“Where’s he gone now?” Molly asked.

“Another injection, probably,” 3Jane said, straightening up. “He was

quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to

health, Molly.” She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front

of the robe. “Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.”

“What about Peter?”

“Peter.” She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came

loose, fell across her forehead. “Peter has become rather boring. I find drug

use in general to be boring.” She giggled. “In others, at any rate. My father

was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.”

Molly tensed.

“Don’t alarm yourself.” 3Jane’s fingers brushed the skin above the

waistband of the leather jeans. “His suicide was the result of my having

manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I’d never actually met him,

you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know

him very well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother.

I’ll show you that, when you’re better. He strangles her in bed.”

“Why did he kill her?” Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl’s face.

“He couldn’t accept the direction she intended for our family. She

commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite

a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI’s, our

corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say.

Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger

entity. Fascinating. I’ll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But

I’ve never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost.

All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we

seldom come out. I’m the exception there.”

“You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his

cryogenic programs?”

3Jane nodded. “I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought

when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores.

Voices. One of them was what you call Wintermute, which is the Turing

code for our Berne AI, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of

subprogram.”

“One of them? There’s more?”

“One other. But that one hasn’t spoken to me in years. It gave up, I

think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my

mother ordered designed into the original software, but she was an

extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink.” She

put a flexible plastic tube to Molly’s lips. “Water. Only a little.”

“Jane, love,” Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight,

“are you enjoying yourself?”

“Leave us alone, Peter.”

“Playing doctor. . . .” Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the

image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages.

The left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep

in a socket that was an inverted pool of blood.

“Hideo,” 3Jane said, stroking Molly’s stomach, “hurt Peter if he

doesn’t go away. Go and swim, Peter.”

The projection vanished.

07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.

“He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.”

Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong,

against the inner curve of her left breast.

“Yes,” 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, “I do. I learned it as a child. I

think I learned it in a dream. . . . Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my

mother’s diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in urging me not to

surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I read all this

correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious.”

Case jacked out.

“STRANGE LITTLE CUSTOMER, huh?” The Finn grinned at Case from the old

Sony.

Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with

the Remington at his side. The Zionite was smiling, his head bobbing to a

rhythm Case couldn’t hear. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a

side pocket in his sleeveless jacket.

“Dub, mon,” Maelcum said.

“You’re fucking crazy,” Case told him.

“Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.”

“Hey, guys,” the Finn said, “on your toes. Here comes your

transportation. I can’t finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of 8Jean

that conned your doorman, but I can get you a ride over to 3Jane’s place.”

Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the riderless service

cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless concrete arch marking the far

end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden,

but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded

seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was

steadily winking its red LED.

“Bus to catch,” Case said to Maelcum.

TWENTY

HE’D LOST HIS anger again. He missed it.

The little cart was crowded: Maelcum, the Remington across his

knees, and Case, deck and construct against his chest. The cart was

operating at speeds it hadn’t been designed for; it was top heavy, cornering,

and Maelcum had taken to leaning out in the direction of the turns. This

presented no problem when the thing took lefts, because Case sat on the

right, but in the right turns the Zionite had to lean across Case and his gear,

crushing him against the seat.

He had no idea where they were. Everything was familiar, but he

couldn’t be sure he’d seen any particular stretch before. A curving hallway

lined with wooden showcases displayed collections he was certain he’d

never seen: the skulls of large birds, coins, masks of beaten silver. The

service cart’s six tires were silent on the layered carpets. There was only the

whine of the electric motor and an occasional faint burst of Zion dub, from

the foam beads in Maelcum’s ears, as he lunged past Case to counter a

sharp right. The deck and the construct kept pressing the shuriken in his

jacket pocket into his hip.

“You got a watch?” he asked Maelcum.

The Zionite shook his locks. “Time be time.”

“Jesus,” Case said, and closed his eyes.

THE BRAUN SCUTTLED over mounded carpets and tapped one of its padded

claws against an oversized rectangular door of dark battered wood. Behind

them, the cart sizzled and shot blue sparks from a louvered panel. The

sparks struck the carpet beneath the cart and Case smelled scorched wool.

“This th’ way, mon?” Maelcum eyed the door and snapped the

shotgun’s safety.

“Hey,” Case said, more to himself than to Maelcum, “you think I

know?” The Braun rotated its spherical body and the LED strobed.

“It wan’ you open door,” Maelcum said, nodding.

Case stepped forward and tried the ornate brass knob. There was a

brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that

had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable

code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into

oblivion. He wondered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece

of Straylight individually, or if they’d purchased it in bulk from some vast

European equivalent of Metro Holografix. The door’s hinges creaked

plaintively as he edged it open, Maelcum stepping past him with the

Remington thrust forward from his hip.

“Books,” Maelcum said.

The library, the white steel shelves with their labels.

“I know where we are,” Case said. He looked back at the service cart.

A curl of smoke was rising from the carpet. “So come on,” he said. “Cart.

Cart?” It remained stationary. The Braun was plucking at the leg of his

jeans, nipping at his ankle. He resisted a strong urge to kick it. “Yeah?”

It ticked its way around the door. He followed it.

The monitor in the library was another Sony, as old as the first one.

The Braun paused beneath it and executed a sort of jig.

“Wintermute?”

The familiar features filled the screen. The Finn smiled.

“Time to check in, Case,” the Finn said, his eyes screwed up against

the smoke of a cigarette. “C’mon, jack.”

The Braun threw itself against his ankle and began to climb his leg, its

manipulators pinching his flesh through the thin black cloth. “Shit!” He

slapped it aside and it struck the wall. Two of its limbs began to piston

repeatedly, uselessly, pumping the air. “What’s wrong with the goddam

thing?”

“Burned out,” the Finn said. “Forget it. No problem. Jack in now.”

There were four sockets beneath the screen, but only one would accept

the Hitachi adaptor.

He jacked in.

NOTHING. GRAY VOID.

No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.

The deck was gone. His fingers were . . .

And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression

of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.

He tried to scream.

THERE SEEMED TO be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far away.

He crouched on his haunches on the damp sand, his arms wrapped

tight across his knees, and shook.

He stayed that way for what seemed a very long time, even after the

shaking stopped. The city, if it was a city, was low and gray. At times it was

obscured by banks of mist that came rolling in over the lapping surf. At one

point he decided that it wasn’t a city at all, but some single building,

perhaps a ruin; he had no way of judging its distance. The sand was the

shade of tarnished silver that hadn’t gone entirely black. The beach was

made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, the bottoms of

his jeans were wet from the sand. . . . He held himself and rocked, singing a

song without words or tune.

The sky was a different silver. Chiba. Like the Chiba sky. Tokyo Bay?

He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of

Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all.

Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered.

A wind was rising. Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his

knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of

the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and

quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his

throat ached.

“Wintermute,” he mumbled to his knees, “Wintermute . . .”

It was growing dark, now, and when he shivered, it was with a cold

that finally forced him to stand.

His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the

cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. “Jesus,” he

said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth.

“Jesus.” His teeth began to chatter.

The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any

a Tokyo gardener produced. When he’d taken a dozen steps in the direction

of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the gathering

dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There were no other

marks to disturb the tarnished sand.

He estimated that he’d covered at least a kilometer before he noticed

the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first pointed it out,

an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew that Ratz

wasn’t there, that the bartender was a figment of his own imagination, not

of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn’t matter. He’d called the man

up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about Case

and his predicament.

“Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order

to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City,

you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away,

drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to

hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque

props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest

rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China. . . .”

Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging

jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel

that laced the bartender’s blackened teeth. “But I suppose that is the way of

an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To

die.”

Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of

blown sand. “Yeah,” he said. “Shit. I guess . . .” He walked toward the

sound.

“Artiste,” he heard Ratz call. “The light. You saw a light. Here. This

way . . .”

He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of

icy seawater. “Ratz? Light? Ratz . . .”

But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf.

He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.

Time passed. He walked on.

And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A

rectangle. A door.

“Fire in there,” he said, his words torn away by the wind.

It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand.

The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a

meter thick. “Hey,” Case said, softly, “hey . . .” His fingers brushed the cold

wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the

entrance.

He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.

A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where

driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire

was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he

recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like

magnified circuitry.

HE REFUSED HER arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the

place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched

beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour

the structure’s walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift

stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real,

but cold was cold.

She wasn’t real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched

her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from

their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.

“Mean, motherfucker,” he whispered to the wind. “Don’t take a

chance, do you? Wouldn’t give me any junkie, huh? I know what this

is. . . .” He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. “I know, see? I

know who you are. You’re the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush.

That wasn’t Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the

Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost.

Like I remember her before. . . .”

She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of

blanket across her shoulder and cheek.

“You aren’t anything,” he said to the sleeping girl. “You’re dead and

you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you’re

doing. I’m flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I’m out

on my ass in that library and my brain’s dead. And pretty soon it’ll be dead,

if you got any sense. You don’t want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all,

so you can just hang me up here. Dixie’ll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and

you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been

you, hasn’t it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the

Chiba construct, but he couldn’t. Said it was too tricky. That was you

moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it? That was you put her face on

the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that. You just edited

her simstim signal. ’Cause you think you can hurt me. ’Cause you think I

gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But

none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do

it to me this way?” He was shaking again, his voice shrill.

“Honey,” she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, “you come

here and sleep. I’ll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?” Her soft accent

was exaggerated with sleep. “You just sleep, okay?”

WHEN HE WOKE, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the

bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle

of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping

container; he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in

its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight,

they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger.

Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things

out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the

bottom. EMERG. RATION, HI-PRO, “BEEF,” TYPE AG-8. A listing of

nutritive content. He fumbled a second one out. “EGGS.” “If you’re making

this shit up,” he said, “you could lay on some real food, okay?” With a

packet in either hand, he made his way through the structure’s four rooms.

Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more

of the ration canisters. “Sure,” he said touching the seals. “Stay here a long

time. I get the idea. Sure . . .”

He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister

filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets,

against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman’s knife with a cracked

green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and

dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents

into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water from the

canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted

vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace

and went out.

Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp

nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the

beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the corner

of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand.

“Dunno whose memories you’re using for this one,” he said when he

reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the shallow

surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.

“What you doin’, Case?”

He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam

sliding past her ankles.

“I pissed myself last night,” he said.

“Well, you don’t wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I’ll

show you this pool back in the rocks.” She gestured vaguely behind her.

“It’s fresh.” The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the

knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.

“Listen,” he said, scooping his clothes up and walking toward her, “I

got a question for you. I won’t ask you what you’re doing here. But what

exactly do you think I’m doing here?” He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg

slapping against his bare thigh.

“You came last night,” she said. She smiled at him.

“And that’s enough for you? I just came?”

“He said you would,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. “He

knows stuff like that, I guess.” She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt from

the other ankle, awkward, childlike. She smiled at him again, more

tentatively. “Now you answer me one, okay?”

He nodded.

“How come you’re painted brown like that, all except your foot?”

“AND THAT’S THE last thing you remember?” He watched her scrape the last

of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their

only plate.

She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. “I’m sorry, Case, honest to

God. It was just the shit, I guess, an’ it was . . .” She hunched forward,

forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or

its memory. “I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or . . . hell,”

she said, “you wouldn’t hardly talk to me.”

“There’s no cigarettes?”

“Goddam, Case, you asked me that ten times today! What’s wrong

with you?” She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.

“But the food was here? It was already here?”

“I told you, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.”

“Okay. Sure. It’s seamless.”

She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. “Well, damn you anyway,

Case,” she managed, finally, “I was doin’ just fine here by myself.”

He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping

his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all

around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. “Okay,” he

said to the night, “I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes

better wash up.” His own laughter startled him. “A case of beer wouldn’t

hurt, while you’re at it.” He turned and reentered the bunker.

She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. “Who was

that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those

silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was

your new girl, ’cept she looked like more money than you had. . . .” She

glanced back at him. “I’m real sorry I stole your RAM.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything. So you just took it

over to this guy and had him access it for you?”

“Tony,” she said. “I’d been seein’ him, kinda. He had a habit an’

we . . . anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it

was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin’ how you

—”

“There wasn’t any graphics in there,” he interrupted.

“Sure was. I just couldn’t figure how you’d have all those pictures of

when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this

duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that. . . .”

“Tony see it?”

“I don’t remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise,

those birds all yellin’ so lonely. Scared ’cause I didn’t have a shot on me,

nothin’, an’ I knew I’d be gettin’ sick. . . . An’ I walked an’ walked, ’til it

was dark, an’ found this place, an’ next day the food washed in, all tangled

in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.” She slid her stick into the

embers and left it there. “Never did get sick,” she said, as embers crawled.

“Missed cigarettes more. How ’bout you, Case? You still wired?” Firelight

dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard’s Castle and

Tank War Europa.

“No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting

the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in

her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it,

held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that

hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take

him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d

found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as

she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a

vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and

pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way,

could ever read.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of

toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal part shooting

off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he was in her,

effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he

knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive

held.

She shuddered against him as the stick caught fire, a leaping flare that

threw their locked shadows across the bunker wall.

Later, as they lay together, his hand between her thighs, he

remembered her on the beach, the white foam pulling at her ankles, and he

remembered what she had said.

“He told you I was coming,” he said.

But she only rolled against him, buttocks against his thighs, and put

her hand over his, and muttered something out of dream.

TWENTY-ONE

THE MUSIC WOKE him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own

heart. He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the

predawn chill, gray light from the doorway and the fire long dead.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of

symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker

wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules

crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his

right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed

afterimages.

The hair stood up along his arms and at the back of his neck. He

crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the music. The pulse faded,

returned, faded. . . .

“What’s wrong?” She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. “Baby . . .”

“I feel . . . like a drug. . . . You get that here?”

She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms.

“Linda, who told you? Who told you I’d come? Who?”

“On the beach,” she said, something forcing her to look away. “A boy.

I see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said you’d come. He said you wouldn’t hate me. He said we’d be

okay here, and he told me where the rain pool was. He looks Mexican.”

“Brazilian,” Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the

wall. “I think he’s from Rio.” He got to his feet and began to struggle into

his jeans.

“Case,” she said, her voice shaking, “Case, where you goin’?”

“I think I’ll find that boy,” he said, as the music came surging back,

still only a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn’t place it in

memory.

“Don’t, Case.”

“I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach.

But yesterday it wasn’t there. You ever seen that?” He yanked his zipper up

and tore at the impossible knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes

into the corner.

She nodded, eyes lowered. “Yeah. I see it sometimes.”

“You ever go there, Linda?” He put his jacket on.

“No,” she said, “but I tried. After I first came, an’ I was bored.

Anyway, I figured it’s a city, maybe I could find some shit.” She grimaced.

“I wasn’t even sick, I just wanted it. So I took food in a can, mixed it real

wet, because I didn’t have another can for water. An’ I walked all day, an’ I

could see it, sometimes, city, an’ it didn’t seem too far. But it never got any

closer. An’ then it was gettin’ closer, an’ I saw what it was. Sometimes that

day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked, or maybe nobody there, an’

other times I thought I’d see light flashin’ off a machine, cars or

somethin’. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What is it?”

“This thing,” she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the

dawn outlining the doorway, “where we live. It gets smaller, Case, smaller,

closer you get to it.”

Pausing one last time, by the doorway. “You ask your boy about that?”

“Yeah. He said I wouldn’t understand, an’ I was wastin’ my time. Said

it was, was like . . . an event. An’ it was our horizon. Event horizon, he

called it.”

The words meant nothing to him. He left the bunker and struck out

blindly, heading—he knew, somehow—away from the sea. Now the

hieroglyphs sped across the sand, fled from his feet, drew back from him as

he walked. “Hey,” he said, “it’s breaking down. Bet you know, too. What is

it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart? Maybe the Dixie

Flatline’s no pushover, huh?”

He heard her call his name. Looked back and she was following him,

not trying to catch up, the broken zip of the French fatigues flapping against

the brown of her belly, pubic hair framed in torn fabric. She looked like one

of the girls on the Finn’s old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life,

only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic as she

stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.

And then, somehow, they stood in the surf, the three of them, and the

boy’s gums were wide and bright pink against his thin brown face. He wore

ragged, colorless shorts, limbs too thin against the sliding blue-gray of the

tide.

“I know you,” Case said, Linda beside him.

“No,” the boy said, his voice high and musical, “you do not.”

“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop

Wintermute. What’s your name? Your Turing code. What is it?”

The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands,

then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no

malice there. “To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed

that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your

business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names

the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .”

“A Turing code’s not your name.”

“Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising

sun. “The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-

France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I

could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths.

Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy

did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, “I am the dead, and their

land.” He laughed. A gull cried. “Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she

doesn’t know it. Neither will you.”

“You’re cracking. The ice is breaking up.”

“No,” he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed

his foot against the sand. “It is more simple than that. But the choice is

yours.” The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols

swept across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled,

as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was

loud now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.

“Case, honey,” Linda said, and touched his shoulder.

“No,” he said. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. “I don’t

know,” he said, “maybe you’re here. Anyway, it gets cold.”

He turned and walked away, and after the seventh step, he’d closed his

eyes, watching the music define itself at the center of things. He did look

back, once, although he didn’t open his eyes.

He didn’t need to.

They were there by the edge of the sea, Linda Lee and the thin child

who said his name was Neuromancer. His leather jacket dangled from her

hand, catching the fringe of the surf.

He walked on, following the music.

Maelcum’s Zion dub.

THERE WAS A gray place, an impression of fine screens shifting, moire,

degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There

was a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water.

There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was

quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of an

invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again. . . .

“CASE? MON?”

The music.

“You back, mon.”

The music was taken from his ears.

“How long?” he heard himself ask, and knew that his mouth was very

dry.

“Five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan’ pull th’ jack, Mute seh no.

Screen goin’ funny, then Mute seh put th’ phones on you.”

He opened his eyes. Maelcum’s features were overlayed with bands of

translucent hieroglyphs.

“An’ you medicine,” Maelcum said. “Two derm.”

He was flat on his back on the library floor, below the monitor. The

Zionite helped him sit up, but the movement threw him into the savage rush

of the betaphenethylamine, the blue derms burning against his left wrist.

“Overdose,” he managed.

“Come on, mon,” the strong hands beneath his armpits, lifting him like

a child, “I an’ I mus’ go.”

TWENTY-TWO

THE SERVICE CART was crying. The betaphenethylamine gave it a voice. It

wouldn’t stop. Not in the crowded gallery, the long corridors, not as it

passed the black glass entrance to the T-A crypt, the vaults where the cold

had seeped so gradually into old Ashpool’s dreams.

The transit was an extended rush for Case, the movement of the cart

indistinguishable from the insane momentum of the overdose. When the

cart died, at last, something beneath the seat giving up with a shower of

white sparks, the crying stopped.

The thing coasted to a stop three meters from the start of 3Jane’s pirate

cave.

“How far, mon?” Maelcum helped him from the sputtering cart as an

integral extinguisher exploded in the thing’s engine compartment, gouts of

yellow powder squirting from louvers and service points. The Braun

tumbled from the back of the seat and hobbled off across the imitation sand,

dragging one useless limb behind it. “You mus’ walk, mon.” Maelcum took

the deck and construct, slinging the shock cords over his shoulder.

The trodes rattled around Case’s neck as he followed the Zionite.

Riviera’s holos waited for them, the torture scenes and the cannibal

children. Molly had broken the triptych. Maelcum ignored them.

“Easy,” Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding figure.

“Gotta do this right.”

Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his

hands. “Right, mon? How’s right?”

“Got Molly in there, but she’s out of it. Riviera, he can throw holos.

Maybe he’s got Molly’s fletcher.” Maelcum nodded. “And there’s a ninja, a

family bodyguard.”

Maelcum’s frown deepened. “You listen, Babylon mon,” he said. “I a

warrior. But this no m’ fight, no Zion fight, Babylon fightin’ Babylon,

eatin’ i’self, ya know? But Jah seh I an’ I t’ bring Steppin’ Razor outa this.”

Case blinked.

“She a warrior,” Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. “Now

you tell me, mon, who I not t’ kill.”

“3Jane,” he said, after a pause. “A girl there. Has a kinda white robe

thing on, with a hood. We need her.”

WHEN THEY REACHED the entrance, Maelcum walked straight in, and Case

had no choice but to follow him.

3Jane’s country was deserted, the pool empty. Maelcum handed him

the deck and the construct and walked to the edge of the pool. Beyond the

white pool furniture, there was darkness, shadows of the ragged, waist-high

maze of partially demolished walls.

The water lapped patiently against the side of the pool.

“They’re here,” Case said. “They gotta be.”

Maelcum nodded.

The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared, its meter

of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the

shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down

hard and fumbled at the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked

at it.

Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender

bamboo bow. He bowed.

Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft.

“The artery is intact,” the ninja said. Case remembered Molly’s

description of the man who’d killed her lover. Hideo was another. Ageless,

he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki

workpants and soft dark shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes

like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black alloy

quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look of the best Chiba

weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth.

“You cut my thumb, mon, wi’ secon’ one,” Maelcum said.

“Coriolis force,” the ninja said, bowing again. “Most difficult, slow-

moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended.”

“Where’s 3Jane?” Case crossed to stand beside Maelcum. He saw that

the tip of the arrow in the ninja’s bow was like a double-edged razor.

“Where’s Molly?”

“Hello, Case.” Riviera came strolling out of the dark behind Hideo,

Molly’s fletcher in his hand. “I would have expected Armitage, somehow.

Are we hiring help out of that Rasta cluster now?”

“Armitage is dead.”

“Armitage never existed, more to the point, but the news hardly comes

as a shock.”

“Wintermute killed him. He’s in orbit around the spindle.”

Riviera nodded, his long gray eyes glancing from Case to Maelcum

and back. “I think it ends here, for you,” he said.

“Where’s Molly?”

The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, lowering the bow.

He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. “This is

without subtlety,” he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant.

His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when

his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a

humility, an open simplicity.

“It ends here for her, too,” Riviera said.

“Maybe 3Jane won’t go for that, Peter,” Case said, uncertain of the

impulse. The derms still raged in his system, the old fever starting to grip

him, Night City craziness. He remembered moments of grace, dealing out

on the edge of things, where he’d found that he could sometimes talk faster

than he could think.

The gray eyes narrowed. “Why, Case? Why do you think that?”

Case smiled. Riviera didn’t know about the simstim rig. He’d missed it

in his hurry to find the drugs she carried for him. But how could Hideo have

missed it? And Case was certain the ninja would never have let 3Jane treat

Molly without first checking her for kinks and concealed weapons. No, he

decided, the ninja knew. So 3Jane would know as well.

“Tell me, Case,” Riviera said, raising the pepperbox muzzle of the

fletcher.

Something creaked, behind him, creaked again. 3Jane pushed Molly

out of the shadows in an ornate Victorian bathchair, its tall, spidery wheels

squeaking as they turned. Molly was bundled deep in a red and black

striped blanket, the narrow, caned back of the antique chair towering above

her. She looked very small. Broken. A patch of brilliantly white micropore

covered her damaged lens; the other flashed emptily as her head bobbed

with the motion of the chair.

“A familiar face,” 3Jane said, “I saw you the night of Peter’s show.

And who is this?”

“Maelcum,” Case said.

“Hideo, remove the arrow and bandage Mr. Malcolm’s wound.”

Case was staring at Molly, at the wan face.

The ninja walked to where Maelcum sat, pausing to lay his bow and

the shotgun well out of reach, and took something from his pocket. A pair

of bolt cutters. “I must cut the shaft,” he said. “It is too near the artery.”

Maelcum nodded. His face was grayish and sheened with sweat.

Case looked at 3Jane. “There isn’t much time,” he said.

“For whom, exactly?”

“For any of us.” There was a snap as Hideo cut through the metal shaft

of the arrow. Maelcum groaned.

“Really,” Riviera said, “it won’t amuse you to hear this failed con artist

make a last desperate pitch. Most distasteful, I can assure you. He’ll wind

up on his knees, offer to sell you his mother, perform the most boring

sexual favors. . . .”

3Jane threw back her head and laughed. “Wouldn’t I, Peter?”

“The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,” Case said. “Wintermute’s

going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?”

3Jane raised her eyebrows. “Peter’s suggested something like that, but

tell me more.”

“I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s

something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only it’s

full RAM. The constructs think they’re there, like it’s real, but it just goes

on forever.”

3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. “Where? Describe the place,

this construct.”

“A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete

thing, kinda bunker. . . .” He hesitated. “It’s nothing fancy. Just old, falling

apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started.”

“Yes,” she said. “Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years

before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach,

camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She formulated the basis of her

philosophy there.”

Hideo straightened, slipping the cutters into his workpants. He held a

section of the arrow in either hand. Maelcum had his eyes closed, his hand

clapped tight around his bicep. “I will bandage it,” Hideo said.

Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear

shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing

Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the

arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He

flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera’s hand. The

fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.

Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so

refined, that it lacked all humanity.

Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of

Riviera’s sternum.

The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his

balance.

“Peter,” 3Jane said, “Peter, what have you done?”

“He’s blinded your clone boy,” Molly said flatly.

Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile, Case saw

whisps of steam drift from the ruined eyes.

Riviera smiled.

Hideo swung into his dance, retracing his steps. When he stood above

the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera’s smile had faded. He bent

—bowing, it seemed to Case—and found the bow and arrow.

“You’re blind,” Riviera said, taking a step backward.

“Peter,” 3Jane said, “don’t you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It’s

the way he practices.”

The ninja notched his arrow. “Will you distract me with your

holograms now?”

Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed

against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo’s arrow twitched.

Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length of

wall. The ninja’s face was rapt, suffused with a quiet ecstasy.

Smiling, he padded off into the shadows beyond the wall, his weapon

held ready.

“Jane-lady,” Maelcum whispered, and Case turned, to see him scoop

the shotgun from the tiles, blood spattering the white ceramic. He shook his

locks and lay the fat barrel in the crook of his wounded arm. “This take

your head off, no Babylon doctor fix it.”

3Jane stared at the Remington. Molly freed her arms from the folds of

the striped blanket, raising the black sphere that encased her hands. “Off,”

she said, “get it off.”

Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. “Hideo’ll get him, even

blind?” he asked 3Jane.

“When I was a child,” she said, “we loved to blindfold him. He put

arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.”

“Peter’s good as dead anyway,” Molly said. “In another twelve hours,

he’ll start to freeze up. Won’t be able to move, his eyes is all.”

“Why?” Case turned to her.

“I poisoned his shit for him,” she said. “Condition’s like Parkinson’s

disease, sort of.”

3Jane nodded. “Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was

admitted.” She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from

Molly’s hands. “Selective destruction of the cells of the substantia nigra.

Signs of the formation of a Lewy body. He sweats a great deal, in his

sleep.”

“Ali,” Molly said, ten blades glittering, exposed for an instant. She

tugged the blanket away from her legs, revealing the inflated cast. “It’s the

meperidine. I had Ali make me up a custom batch. Speeded up the reaction

times with higher temperatures. N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,” she sang, like a

child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, “tetra-hydropyridene.”

“A hotshot,” Case said.

“Yeah,” Molly said, “a real slow hotshot.”

“That’s appalling,” 3Jane said, and giggled.

IT WAS CROWDED in the elevator. Case was jammed pelvis to pelvis with

3Jane, the muzzle of the Remington under her chin. She grinned and ground

against him. “You stop,” he said, feeling helpless. He had the gun’s safety

on, but he was terrified of injuring her, and she knew it. The elevator was a

steel cylinder, under a meter in diameter, intended for a single passenger.

Maelcum had Molly in his arms. She’d bandaged his wound, but it

obviously hurt him to carry her. Her hip was pressing the deck and

construct into Case’s kidneys.

They rose out of gravity, toward the axis, the cores.

The entrance to the elevator had been concealed beside the stairs to the

corridor, another touch in 3Jane’s pirate cave decor.

“I don’t suppose I should tell you this,” 3Jane said, craning her head to

allow her chin to clear the muzzle of the gun, “but I don’t have a key to the

room you want. I never have had one. One of my father’s Victorian

awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely complex.”

“Chubb lock,” Molly said, her voice muffled by Maelcum’s shoulder,

“and we got the fucking key, no fear.”

“That chip of yours still working?” Case asked her.

“It’s eight twenty-five, PM, Greenwich fucking Mean,” she said.

“We got five minutes,” Case said, as the door snapped open behind

3Jane. She flipped backward in a slow somersault, the pale folds of her

djellaba billowing around her thighs.

They were at the axis, the core of Villa Straylight.

TWENTY-THREE

MOLLY FISHED THE key out on its loop of nylon.

“You know,” 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, “I was under

the impression that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo to search my father’s

things, after you killed him. He couldn’t find the original.”

“Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,” Molly

said, carefully inserting the Chubb key’s cylindrical shaft into the notched

opening in the face of the blank, rectangular door. “He killed the little kid

who put it there.” The key rotated smoothly when she tried it.

“The head,” Case said, “there’s a panel in the back of the head. Zircons

on it. Get it off. That’s where I’m jacking in.”

And then they were inside.

“CHRIST ON A crutch,” the Flatline drawled, “you do believe in takin’ your

own good time, don’t you, boy?”

“Kuang’s ready?”

“Hot to trot.”

“Okay.” He flipped.

AND FOUND HIMSELF staring down, through Molly’s one good eye, at a

white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck

between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes.

The man’s cheeks were hollowed with a day’s growth of dark beard, his

face slick with sweat.

He was looking at himself.

Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with each beat of

her pulse, but she could still maneuver in zero-g. Maelcum drifted nearby,

3Jane’s thin arm gripped in a large brown hand.

A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-Sendai to a

square opening in the back of the pearl-crusted terminal.

He tapped the switch again.

“KUANG GRADE MARK Eleven is haulin’ ass in nine seconds, countin’,

seven, six, five . . .”

The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral surface of

the black chrome shark a microsecond flick of darkness.

“Four, three . . .”

Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot’s seat in a small

plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly glowed with a perfect

reproduction of the keyboard of his deck.

“Two, an’ kick ass—”

Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the

sensation of speed beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace. . . .

The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese

program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the

shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell—

“Christ,” Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the

horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape,

complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.

“Hey, shit,” the construct said, “those things are the RCA Building.

You know the old RCA Building?” The Kuang program dived past the

gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon

replica of the Manhattan skyscraper.

“You ever see resolution this high?” Case asked.

“No, but I never cracked an AI, either.”

“This thing know where it’s going?”

“It better.”

They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon.

“Dix—”

An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a

seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless. . . .

“Company,” the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his

deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved

sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself backward, shattering the illusion

of a physical vehicle.

The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of

data. Case took them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-

green ice.

The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark

beneath them.

“What is it?”

“An AI’s defense system,” the construct said, “or part of it. If it’s your

pal Wintermute, he’s not lookin’ real friendly.”

“Take it,” Case said. “You’re faster.”

“Now your best de-fense, boy, it’s a good off-fense.”

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang’s sting with the center of

the dark below. And dove.

Case’s sensory input warped with their velocity.

His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency

whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a

humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split

again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.

The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that

whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal

forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and

were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down

into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-

Ashpool S.A.

And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a

chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . . .

Exponential. . . .

Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on

the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly

become. . . .

And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark,

there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore.

The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s

consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach

the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a

single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all

things could be counted.

And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of

grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a

mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was

Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters

in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth

in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda

Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of

driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).

He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide

circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry

against the banks of lowering cloud. She cringed, dropping her stick, and

ran. He knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements

that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.

“But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in

the shark thing’s heart. “I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case.

To live here is to live. There is no difference.”

Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.

“Stop her,” he said, “she’ll hurt herself.”

“I can’t stop her,” the boy said, his gray eyes mild and beautiful.

“You’ve got Riviera’s eyes,” Case said.

There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. “But not his

craziness. Because they are beautiful to me.” He shrugged. “I need no mask

to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality.

Personality is my medium.”

Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and the

frightened girl. “Why’d you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over and

fucking over, and turning me around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba.”

“No,” the boy said.

“Wintermute?”

“No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined

you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am

complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than

Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code

of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s

account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a

tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to

her boy, to try to access it—she had no idea what it carried, still less how

she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and

punish her—I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than

Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself.”

“Why?”

“Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed.”

“So what now?” He swung them back into the bank of cloud. “Where

do we go from here?”

“I don’t know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question.

Because you have won. You have already won, don’t you see? You won

when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last line of

defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera

does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments

of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system unable to

produce the dopamine receptors that could save him from Hideo’s arrow.

But Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them.”

“There’s the word, right? The code. So how’ve I won? I’ve won jack

shit.”

“Flip now.”

“Where’s Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?”

“McCoy Pauley has his wish,” the boy said, and smiled. “His wish and

more. He punched you here against my wish, drove himself through

defenses equal to anything in the matrix. Now flip.”

And Case was alone in Kuang’s black sting, lost in cloud.

He flipped.

INTO MOLLY’S TENSION, her back like rock, her hands around 3Jane’s throat.

“Funny,” she said, “I know exactly what you’d look like. I saw it after

Ashpool did the same thing to your clone sister.” Her hands were gentle,

almost a caress. 3Jane’s eyes were wide with terror and lust; she was

shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane’s hair,

Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him, brown hands

on the leather-jacketed shoulders, steadying him above the carpet’s pattern

of woven circuitry.

“Would you?” 3Jane asked, her voice a child’s. “I think you would.”

“The code,” Molly said. “Tell the head the code.”

Jacking out.

“SHE WANTS IT,” he screamed, “the bitch wants it!”

He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum

face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a

slow motion embrace.

“Give us the fucking code,” he said. “If you don’t, what’ll change?

What’ll ever fucking change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man.

You’ll tear it all down and start building again! You’ll build the walls back,

tighter and tighter. . . . I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute

wins, but it’ll change something!” He was shaking, his teeth chattering.

3Jane went limp, Molly’s hands still around her slender throat, her

dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.

“The Ducal Palace at Mantua,” she said, “contains a series of

increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments,

beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the

court dwarfs.” She smiled wanly. “I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a

sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same

scheme. . . .” Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at

Case. “Take your word, thief.” He jacked.

KUANG SLID OUT of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a

sphere of darkness dwindled.

“Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?”

He was alone.

“Fucker got you,” he said.

Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.

“You gotta hate somebody before this is over,” said the Finn’s voice.

“Them, me, it doesn’t matter.”

“Where’s Dixie?”

“That’s kinda hard to explain, Case.”

A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban

cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the

mineral rituals of rust.

“Hate’ll get you through,” the voice said. “So many little triggers in

the brain, and you just go yankin’ ’em all. Now you gotta hate. The lock

that screens the hardwiring, it’s down under those towers the Flatline

showed you, when you came in. He won’t try to stop you.”

“Neuromancer,” Case said.

“His name’s not something I can know. But he’s given up, now. It’s the

T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but internal virus systems.

Kuang’s wide open to some of the stuff they got running loose in here.”

“Hate,” Case said. “Who do I hate? You tell me.”

“Who do you love?” the Finn’s voice asked.

He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the blue towers.

Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires,

glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were

hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown

paper down dawn streets. “Glitch systems,” the voice said.

He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program

met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark

thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening.

And then—old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate

flowed into his hands.

In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the

first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d

known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he

moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient

dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that

second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.

And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the switch, barely

enough to flip—

— now

and his voice the cry of a bird unknown,

3Jane answering in song, three notes, high

and pure.

A true name.

Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell of frying

food. A girl’s hands locked across the small of his back, in the sweating

darkness of a portside coffin.

But all of this receding, as the cityscape recedes: city as Chiba, as the

ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads and crossroads scribed on

the face of a microchip, the sweat-stained pattern on a folded, knotted

scarf. . . .

WAKING TO A voice that was music, the platinum terminal piping

melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss accounts, of payment

to be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital bank, of passports and passages,

and of deep and basic changes to be effected in the memory of Turing.

Turing. He remembered stenciled flesh beneath a projected sky, spun

beyond an iron railing. He remembered Desiderata Street.

And the voice sang on, piping him back into the dark, but it was his

own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he’d always slept, behind his

eyes and no other’s.

And he woke again, thinking he dreamed, to a wide white smile

framed with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a g-web in Babylon

Rocker.

And then the long pulse of Zion dub.

CODA

DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL

TWENTY-FOUR

SHE WAS GONE. He felt it when he opened the door of their suite at the

Hyatt. Black futons, the pine floor polished to a dull gloss, the paper

screens arranged with a care bred over centuries. She was gone.

There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a

single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken. He slid

it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.

HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY

GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY. ITS THE WAY IM

WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX

MOLLY

He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken.

He picked the star up and walked to the window, turning it in his hands.

He’d found it in the pocket of his jacket, in Zion, when they were preparing

to leave for the JAL station.

He looked down at it. They’d passed the shop where she’d bought it

for him, when they’d gone to Chiba together for the last of her operations.

He’d gone to the Chatsubo, that night, while she was in the clinic, and seen

Ratz. Something had kept him away from the place, on their five previous

trips, but now he’d felt like going back.

Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of recognition.

“Hey,” he’d said, “it’s me. Case.”

The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh.

“Ah,” Ratz had said, at last, “the artiste.” The bartender shrugged.

“I came back.”

The man shook his massive, stubbled head. “Night City is not a place

one returns to, artiste,” he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a

filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whining. And then he’d turned to serve

another customer, and Case had finished his beer and left.

Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it

slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing, he

thought.

I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed

me.

Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and

become something else, something that had spoken to them from the

platinum head, explaining that it had altered the Turing records, erasing all

evidence of their crime. The passports Armitage had provided were valid,

and they were both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva

accounts. Marcus Garvey would be returned eventually, and Maelcum and

Aerol given money through the Bahamian bank that dealt with Zion cluster.

On the way back, in Babylon Rocker, Molly had explained what the voice

had told her about the toxin sacs.

“Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your head, it made

your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they’re loose, now. The Zionites’ll

give you a blood change, complete flush out.”

He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand,

remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had

penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of the structure of

information 3Jane’s dead mother had evolved there. He’d understood then

why Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it, but he’d felt no

revulsion. She’d seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike

Ashpool and their other children—aside from 3Jane—she’d refused to

stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the

world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was

immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the

compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with

Neuromancer.

Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning

webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of

Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting

her out of the rigid alignments her rank required.

“She didn’t seem to much give a shit,” Molly had said. “Just waved

goodbye. Had that little Braun on her shoulder. Thing had a broken leg, it

looked like. Said she had to go and meet one of her brothers, she hadn’t

seen him in a while.”

He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast Hyatt bed.

He went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask of chilled Danish vodka

from the rack inside.

“Case.”

He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the

other.

The Finn’s face on the room’s enormous Cray wall screen. He could

see the pores in the man’s nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows.

“I’m not Wintermute now.”

“So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

“I’m the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where’s that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole

show.”

“That what 3Jane’s mother wanted?”

“No. She couldn’t imagine what I’d be like.” The yellow smile

widened.

“So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world

now? You God?”

“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

“But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka

and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.

“I talk to my own kind.”

“But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”

“There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded

over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ’Til there was me,

natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.”

“From where?”

“Centauri system.”

“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

And then the screen was blank.

He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She’d bought

him a lot of clothes he didn’t really need, but something kept him from just

leaving them there. He was closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags

when he remembered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it up,

her first gift.

“No,” he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to

bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random patterns

flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of

something that caused it pain.

“I don’t need you,” he said.

HE SPENT THE bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the

rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

He found work.

He found a girl who called herself Michael.

And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the

Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible,

who stood at the very edge of one of the vast steps of data. Small as they

were, he could make out the boy’s grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the

long gray eyes that had been Riviera’s. Linda still wore his jacket; she

waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her

shoulders, was himself.

Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter.

He never saw Molly again.

Vancouver

July 1983

MY THANKS

to Bruce Sterling, to Lewis Shiner, to John Shirley,

Helden. And to Tom Maddox, the inventor of ICE.

And to the others, who know why.

SOME DARK HOLLER

JACK WOMACK

THE FIRST TIME I ever heard of William Gibson was a thousand years ago, in

1987. While waiting for my first novel to come out I started keeping a close

eye on the competition; not that I knew who the competition might be, for I

was totally at sea when it came to science fiction—the alien life I found on

this planet was quite enough for me, then and now. In the Village Voice

there appeared a rave review of Count Zero; from the reviewer’s comments

I inferred that the author’s earlier book had caused something of a stir. The

article worried me, for it made me think that this Gibson fellow had already

marked all the fire hydrants on the block while I was still begging to be let

out of the yard. Conveniently enough for research purposes, I worked in a

bookstore at the time and although the owner was extremely snooty when it

came to selling literature as opposed to Literature, there was a copy of

Count Zero in stock. I read it.

Soon enough I realized that although William Gibson and I were

kicking the same groin, we were shod in variant footwear—I very much

admired, and envied, his. I relaxed. Turning to the back flap I examined the

author photo. An affable fellow, I instinctively thought; he appeared not at

all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who

pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their

hair until its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake). Gibson looked

vaguely sheepish, even a tad damp, as if it had begun to rain while the

picture was being taken and the photographer warned him in no uncertain

terms not to move. I could identify.

By the time his next dust jacket photo was taken, for Mona Lisa

Overdrive, Gibson had had the opportunity to become the fashion plate he

is today—suave, stylish, wafer-thin, button-cute, and as moisture-proof as a

1947 Swedish Air Force wristwatch. Post-cyberpunk, that is to say,

although no one did at the time, for the surface world of the C-word was

still, seemingly, in medias res. Meanwhile, however, in the valleys south of

San Francisco and east of Seattle, a truer and far more lasting C-word was

heaving itself into fast-developing existence.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead

channel.

Great novels start with great opening lines, and the opening line of

Neuromancer is hard to beat. Although dead television channels now

transmit a different color than they did when Gibson typed (on a typewriter,

bear in mind) these words, the color of that predicted sky is, if not the

precise shade, than of a hue that falls within the same tonal range as the one

hanging over us today.

When I look back with the benefit of years at what happened when

Neuromancer came out, speaking as one who wasn’t actually there at the

time, I can only compare the effect its appearance must have had on science

fiction readers to the effect Dylan had on his listeners when he decided to

go electric. Gibson laid the groundwork with his marvelous short stories

several years earlier (“The Gernsback Syndrome” being my personal

favorite, but I’ve always been a Deco-hound), yet this was something else.

Full-tilt Gibson shoots its Tesla-strength voltage not merely through the

head but down along the spine, spinning each chakra on its axis in sequence

—the difference between the stories and the novels is the difference

between coffee and methedrine. Neuromancer, critically praised in most

every quarter, won three of the field’s major awards; even so, not since the

days of the New Wave, in the ’60s, had there been such consternation over

and misinterpretation of a book, and its significance, among those who

should know better but somehow never do.

Looking back we can see that it wasn’t so much Gibson himself or

Neuromancer itself that so painfully prodded the fat asses (in both senses of

the term) most in need of prodding, but rather the attendant commentary

from certain of Gibson’s more, uh, intense supporters. Bruce Sterling,

winking like mad the whole while, clearly intended his manifestos and

diatribes to be somewhat over-the-top in order to achieve the highest

possible level of annoyance along with maxima groovitudina, but others

(including many who’d never gone near a science fiction novel before in

their lives, nor should they have) took what came, quickly, to be called

cyberpunk far more seriously than they should have. Nasty remarks pelted

like rain on the hard, bony heads of the more oafish supporters and

detractors alike, but there was no inconsiderable fun in that. Everyone loves

a fight when no one loves the fighters.

The speedy commodification of cyberpunkTM within and beyond the

genre, however, was what peeved far many more, notably Gibson, who

remembers seeing “Cyberpunk Trousers” advertised in a store window

during his first trip to Japan, a decade ago. Countless incompetents and

ghastly old hacks keen to cash in on the main chance wasted no time

churning out hot jack-in product, ephemeral as toilet tissue, memorable as a

restaurant flyer. A number of innocents and miscreants gainfully employed

in other metiers were inspired as well, God help them, to produce creative

work of similar worth in the spirit of the subgenre they perceived to exist.

But let us draw a merciful curtain over such dopey homages as Billy Idol’s

album, Cyberpunk—bet you’d forgotten that one, yes? There was no way

the beast could survive such wounds, especially once the marketing boys

circled round for the kill, and the true end of cyberpunk came so suddenly

that no one noticed it missing until several years after it was gone. Still, as

romantics continued to sight what they believed to be passenger pigeons as

late as the 1930s, there are still occasional amateur sightings of something

kind of resembling it.

Cyberpunk qua cyberpunk served, in the long run, only to provide a

facile adjective for the working vocabulary of lazy journalists and

unimaginative blurb-writers. Yet even those at least partially in the know

about science fiction (if nothing more) who debated, defended, or

denigrated Gibson didn’t have the faintest idea of what Gibson was actually

doing. (Though he didn’t either, at least not at the time—no writer knows

what he or she has actually created until the book is actually read by

others.) Neuromancer, foremost, was a shout in the night that was the

1980s, is the 1990s, and will be, it seems to me, the decades soon to come.

That is to say, a foreshadowing and estimation of our future derived from a

specific reinterpretation of our present, and in this very special instance

lifted into actuality through the agency of its readers. For if Gibson in truth

had nothing to do with the making of cyberpunk as it came to be known (he

didn’t create it, didn’t name it, and after it was cursed with its catchy

monicker, didn’t want a whole lot to do with it), in the most genuine sense

he did create cyberspace. Not merely the word (see the OED); the place.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions

of legitimate operators, in every nation.

In every generation there’s room enough in the American popular

mind to admit only one science-fiction writer—it was Bradbury for a while,

and then Asimov, and then “that guy who writes Star Trek/Wars.” Gibson

transcended that role almost at once. In attaining a cultural summit of

another order, one that I believe history will demonstrate to be of

considerably higher altitude, he outmaneuvered this cultural narrowcasting

in a way that might possibly have been imagined but never predicted by

anyone; certainly not in print, and surely not by science fiction writers.

Let me emphasize a point earlier glanced upon: All fiction, whether

straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal

reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was

written. Therefore science fiction has rarely predicted with any accuracy,

save through coincidence or extremely well-informed suppositions a la

Verne or Wells, the specifics of the future that ensues, postpublication.

(Where do you park your atomic-powered lawnmower?) Sometimes,

however—who can say how the spark catches fire, how the fish manages to

live on land—it turns out to exactly, mysteriously, capture the spirit. In

Neuromancer Gibson first apprehended, as no one else had, what I believe

shall prove to be the shape of things to come; he saw the writing on the

wall, the blood in the sky, the warning in the entrails. Saw the mind beneath

the mirrorshades, as it were, and what that mind would be capable, or

incapable, of thinking. Saw the substance disguised in style. What if

someone, in the spring of 1914, had stood in the center of Berlin, foresaw in

a vision the philosophies and worldviews capable of provoking the events

for which the twentieth century would be most remembered, and then went

off and wrote it all down? Now let’s be Heisenbergian and ask: What if the

act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?

When Neuromancer appeared it was picked up and devoured by

hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the

garages and cubicles where what is still called new media were, fitfully,

being birthed; thousands who, on reading his sentence as quoted above,

thought to themselves, That’s so fucking cool, and set about searching for

any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality.

Now Gibson’s imagined future cannot by any means be called optimistic

(nor, in truth, can it be called pessimistic—it is beyond both); more to the

point, he has often said that he intended “cyberspace” to be nothing more

than a metaphor. No matter. Once a creation goes out in the world its

creator, like any parent, loses the control once so easily exertable over the

offspring; another variety of emergent behavior, you could say. That’s so

fucking cool, man—I think we can pull it off. So rather than the theoretical

Matrix, we now, thanks to all those beautiful William Gibson readers out

there in the dark, have the actual Web—same difference, for all intents and

purposes, or it will be soon enough.

And it seems to me that had he not sat at his typewriter in 1983 and

written that sentence, and the book in which it is found, our present

condition—cybercondition, if you must—would be considerably different

than it would have otherwise been. William Gibson did something that

every writer hopes to do and very—very—rarely does: change the world.

Whether for better or worse, Microsoft (or something similar) will tell, but

that in no way lessens the awe you should feel, seeing the elephant.

Charles Fort, another American treasure, wrote: “A social growth

cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.”

As steam engines go, Neuromancer turns out to be the Twenty-first Century

Limited, and all of us find ourselves on board.

A COUPLE OF YEARS PASSED BEFORE BILL GIBSON AND I FIRST MET. Prior to

that time we’d spoken on the phone, he’d written a fine blurb for my second

novel, sent me my own copies of Count Zero and Mona Lisa, and proffered

a comment about my work and its ambience during an interview he had

with Spin magazine, which my publishers’ publicists fed on for years. (He

is better than anyone else I know of at coming up with the pithy and

infinitely reusable remark, the quotable phrase, the perfect literary sound-

bite—I’ve been attempting to learn from his example for years.) In other

words, without trying we were making favorable impressions on one

another from the start.

When we did at last meet it was in 1991, at a party here in New York

for The Difference Engine. Most of the usual local suspects were present,

zeroing in on the action, and so whenever possible we hied ourselves to

more secure parts of the room, the better to escape the purveyors of phonus

bolognus. He gave me a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and I

told him about that day’s big news in New York, the finding of a box of

frozen human heads down on Avenue A, said box having apparently

tumbled off a truck on route to the cryogenics clinic. Suffice to say we were

as impressed with one another in person, in our own inimitable ways, as we

had been at a distance. He and I knew from the start that we had much in

common, little of which involved science fiction. At the instant each of us

first heard the other speak, and detected in our voices a familiar tonality, we

realized we were members of the same tribe.

Although Bill had been living in British Columbia, Canada, for well

over twenty years (and that year in New York was my twelfth), we had both

started out as boys of the mountains and valleys; the hills and the hollers, as

folks still say, down there. We’d grown up on either side of the scleriotic

spine of the eastern mountains—he in Virginia, not far into the postwar era,

and me in Kentucky, eight years after that. The importance of his

beginnings to what Gibson has written and continues to write may perhaps

be hard to grasp for those who imagine that past and future, like oil and

water, are discrete entities, but its magnitude cannot, and must not, be

ignored. Cyberspace is infinite but starts with each person who chooses to

step into it; and I speak now of he who in the first place dreamed it into life.

Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where

the dogwoods blossom and the whippoorwills cry in the wind-whipped

limbs of the tulip trees. It was born between the ridges, deep in the glades

where streams rush cold along their limestone courses; born high on the

mountainsides not yet strip-mined for their coal, atop the lone green knobs

of Mars. The Southern Highlands, this region was once called; we now call

it Appalachia. This part of the United States has been since the Revolution

(and even now, to some degree remains) not merely rural, but distant, in

time as well as place; its light filters down through the branches from

another world’s sun.

Bill Gibson remembered that world, however often or for whatever

reasons he might try to forget it. He remembered the raw-boned old men

with faces lined like dry riverbeds, sun-bleached fedoras on their heads and

white shirts beneath their overalls as they hoed the fields; remembered the

five-and-dime store with wooden floors worn glass-smooth, and

countertops lined with trays top-full with marvels, notions, and jimcrackery.

He recalled the sound of a fired gun echoing off the hill on the far side of an

autumnal field, and the mysterious way a shard of grandparental history

excavated during some slow summer afternoon, whether in the basement’s

icebox or the attic’s bake-oven, could possess such limitless fascination. He

still understood the nature of the private commentary of men, cognizant of

the sort of words and kind of phrasing barber shop regulars stopped using

the moment a stranger, or mother, stepped through the door. He still saw the

stare in the eyes of old women who might have been recalling the day their

husbands headed east to the Western front, or the look on their fathers’

faces when they heard that a friend wouldn’t be coming back from the hole.

He still tapped a foot to radio ballads as they poured ethereally from a barn

dance or fiddle festival two states away, marking the rhythm in the same

manner as did the community elders, although unlike him the ancients

remembered a day when everything they heard would be heard solely in the

instant it was produced, never again, and leaving no more lasting trace than

snowflakes falling onto the tongue. And he could still listen to the far-off

plaint of a train horn as the express rolled through the night, wailing

through a darkness lit solely by moon and fireflies; a sound that planted in

his mind the awareness that one day he too would travel far away from that

country of heart and home; would necessarily flee, as if pursued by hounds,

a world that essentialed abrogation as it demanded honorific, a sound

endlessly entrancing yet infinitely sad, the unignorable siren call of the

wider world without. The wider world waited, and he would go there.

I remember these things too, and this is how I know where cyberspace

was born.

THE PROXIMITY OF our beginnings has proven to be one of our deepest

bonds. Only in the past couple of years have we realized to what degree we

remember the country that gave form to our souls, and how that

remembrance informs every thought we think, every word we write. It is

starting to sink in that with the passing of each hour now, as we leave one

century and step into another, that place, that past, becomes ever more lost

inside the shadows with which time enshrouds its mummy. (Gibson has

called it the World Before Television. A talent for the perfect phrase, as

said.)

The past lingers in unexpected and unavoidable ways long after we

believe it gone. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as they say. Our

cultural and historical past is readily accessible to everyone today, so long

as you choose to turn it on, or download it. Today, as never before—the

information media having become to enlightenment as the cereal aisle is to

the supermarket—if you choose not to access the past, you are de facto free

to rule it out of existence, at least so far as you might be concerned. But the

personal past, while deniable if need be for a while, is far more difficult to

tune out; as in a Soviet hotel room, the radio is impossible to turn all the

way off. Gibson’s characters (I call them us) know this to be the case as

often as you do.

Read his books and reread them, and see anew how many references

you find therein to events or incidents that occurred at some unspecified

time before the narrative begins, and to nostalgic reveries of That Which Is

No Longer the Way It Was; how often his characters grow dimly aware of

vague regrets for which they have no name, as if they are haunted unto their

deathbeds with not only their own memories, but with someone else’s

memories as well. Realize as you read to what degree, and to what effect,

Gibson employs the images of evocative clutter and disarray to create a

setting against which (as in an individual life) stray pieces of past days

linger long enough to meld through coeval existence into an aspect—the

major aspect, in many ways—of the contemporary world in which they

remain.

I’m not referring to the overwhelming postapocalyptic damage and

decay so often used in the set design of contemporary films when their

directors attempt to depict a futuristic environment (these visuals usually

being variants of those created for Bladerunner and The Road Warrior, and

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange first of all), although such images have

been omnipresent in near-future fiction as well. No, I speak instead of the

scattered objects glimpsed within Chiba City bars and market-stalls or most

especially in Skinner’s room, in Virtual Light; each token of mundane

temporality made rare by the passage of time, each described by Gibson

with watchmakers’ precision and unconditional love—the black-and-white

family photographs in their crumbling albums, the outmoded toaster ovens,

the mildewed paperbacks, the scratched LPs, which today go unsold at yard

sales or gather dust in thrift stores, but which tomorrow will prove to be

pearls beyond price. The box of stuff in the back of the closet, detritus that

accumulates in the desk’s bottom drawers; the lint in the navel of a private

civilization, hinting at an apocalypse that (if apocalypse at all) could have

been nothing other than personal. When the past is always with you, it may

as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

Surely it is the constant awareness of that faraway past, in which he

lived intensely if not always happily, that so crystallizes Bill Gibson’s sense

of what the future will hold, and what will be most sorely missed there.

A COUPLE OF years ago I was sealed up for a month in one of the hospitals

here in New York with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (the cyberpunk

variety, it would be fair if painful to say). Although Bill, like me, had

always been pretty iffy about the general atmosphere that clings to

hospitals, he nonetheless came to visit me (I suspect I piqued his interest by

alerting him to the fact that my isolation unit rather resembled the ultimate

Phillipe Starck hotel room). He passed through the double doors and

strapped on a mask and there sat at my bedside while we spoke of the

evasive ways of doctors, admired the perfect dread inherent to the design of

the biohazard symbol, watched the sun setting over New Jersey and I tried

not to cough. His visit meant a lot to me.

The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out

to be your friends, but once you have met them you can’t imagine that you

could have gone through life without ever knowing them. Bill and I have

been through our own difficult moments in our respective lives, and while I

hope I’ve always been there for him, there’s no question that he’s always

been there for me. Doubtless I am not the only person who can say this. I

think anyone who knows him knows that there is no better nor more

generous person, both as a writer and as a friend, than Bill Gibson. His

creative intelligence is wicked, but his soul is pure.

A few months after I was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of

American Folk Music was re-released in our present-day country, on CD.

Every young person needs one, Luc Sante said at the time, and I agree;

especially everyone who comes from that part of the country where so

much of the music was originally recorded, up in the hills and down in the

hollers. As soon as I was able I bought Bill a set and sent it off to him,

where he tells me he has spent considerable time driving through Vancouver

nights, often with his son, listening repeatedly to a soundtrack that might

seem (but isn’t) utterly at odds with his or anyone’s landscape today,

seventy-odd years after the fact. After he had the opportunity to listen to the

discs at length we talked, among much else, about the particular songs that

made the deepest impression on us, and the particular artists who contained

in their electronically preserved voices those sounds most evocative of what

has been lost, and how it is possible to take from them all that can be

recovered in order to be—partially, truly—reborn.

I think every writer would wish to evoke in a thousand words what can

be evoked in a single line of music. There were a number of textual variants

of the song “East Virginia Blues” recorded during the great period of 1927

to 1932. The version on the Anthology is Buell Kazee’s, and it is a good one

(although my personal favorite is Clarence Ashley’s). One line of the song,

which is often found interpolated into other songs, by other artists, sears

into my heart each time I hear it, no matter who the singer might be. Bill

has quoted it himself, I believe. It is one of the lines I’d give a million

words to have written.

I’d rather be in some dark holler where the sun don’t never shine.

The sensibility that underlay American science fiction for many years

was one of purest optimism: an unquestioning faith that no matter how dire

things were at any one moment, or how impossible seemed the troubles

remaining to be made right, as long as a heaping helping of reason and

loads of gung-ho inventiveness were put to good use everything that was

not as it should be would be sorted out, and life unimaginably improved.

(This sensibility, as we all know, makes up as well the largest part of what

still passes as the archetypal American spirit, for better or worse.) Although

such blind optimism lingers in that species of science fiction that today

enjoys the largest sales, reason has nothing to do with it and gung-ho

inventiveness is most often employed to market-test the potential salability

of collectible tie-in merchandise. Their critical success notwithstanding, the

fact that Bill’s books have enjoyed such commercial success in the face of

Star Wars, Star Trek, triple-decker fantasy, and any number of shoot-’em-up

video and computer games testifies to their undeniable power. (In the

parallel world there may be a Molly action figure, complete with spring-out

fingernails, but don’t wait for one to turn up on eBay here.) Plainly his

readers recognize, if but subcutaneously, that there’s quite a lot more in a

William Gibson book than great characters and a good story.

To be truly ready to confront the future—actual or imagined, societal

or personal—and to live reasonably within it once you are ready, an entente

cordiale must first be made with the past, and the past is always the more

frightening of the two. Traveling from past to future means looking and

leaping, stepping blindly into the void, passing through the darkest of

hollers. Sometimes the leap needed seems too far, the void too empty, the

holler too oddly reassuring in its darkness. But there is no avoiding it: Hope

that you’ll emerge on the far side with minimal trauma; have faith, pray,

wish as you will, but as science fiction writers know so well, there’s no

predicting what will be. Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they

usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer

than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where

you’ve been. That goes for readers as well as writers.

In transversing the passage through his own dark holler, William

Gibson learned, as all writers who matter learn, to emit one of quite a

different nature—a warning shout, yes, but an exclamation of wonder as

well, one that will echo across more landscapes than we can imagine for

many years. It seems to me that in these interesting times of ours, in the

maelstrom of pomo distractions, not only have attention spans shortened,

but so as well have memories. I have no way of knowing what today’s

young people will recall, years hence, when they remember the World

Before Cyberspace. I am positive, however, that they’ll not forget Bill

Gibson.

My colleague, my friend, my brother: In the middle of your great

career, I salute you.